Political correctness can conceal truth

 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada)

Note: This post originally appeared as a column in the April 2012 edition of the Detroit Native Sun

 

By John Telford

    Black (and many white) reactionaries are still calling Nevada Senator Harry Reid a racist for simply stating a probable truth — that many of President Obama’s white (and some black) supporters were swayed to vote for him because he’s light-skinned and speaks "standard" idiomatic American English.　

     It’s known in southeastern Michigan that I’ve battled white racists throughout my career and called them what they are in print, in board halls, and over the air.　

     As I said regarding Rochester’s resident racists when I was the deputy superintendent there, and as I said again two decades later on television regarding Madison Heights’ racists when I was the superintendent there, "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you can be pretty sure it’s a duck."　

     Sen. Reid is a liberal Democrat with a record of supporting African-Americans.　 A "duck" he definitely isn’t.　　

     This brings to mind the Dale Lick case of 1993. Dr. Lick was the Michigan State University governing board’s favored candidate　for the MSU presidency, until word got out that he had said blacks are innately superior in some aspects of athletics. When confronted with that with that statement during the interviews, he refused to recant. By all accounts, he was the best candidate.　　

     Many mainstream publications, including Runner’s World in a 1992 article, have stated the obvious in asserting that athletes of West African descent are generally faster sprinters than are athletes of purely European descent. Throughout the past half-century, Track & Field News’ annual listings of the world’s 100 top times in the dash races confirm that 95 percent of them were usually clocked by Caribbean or American blacks, who some anthropologists hypothesize are collectively stronger and faster due to innate muscular-skeletal traits, plus hybridization and slavery’s brutal "natural selection."  In the 1950s in national and international competition, nearly all of my toughest opponents at 100, 200, and 400 meters were African-Americans or Jamaicans.　　　　

     Dale Lick’s statistically supported statement cost him the MSU job, even though he had also made this relevantly redeeming remark, "Just because Blacks are superior in athletics doesn’t mean they’re inferior in something else."　

     When we insert the word "intellectually" in place of the words "in something else," we reach the crux of this issue.　 I taught black youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds who with what in those bygone days was a good Detroit Public School education became top academicians. They included Southeastern High alumnus john powell (uses no caps in his name), a former Harvard professor and national legal director of the ACLU. I encouraged them to be able to switch from dialect to the "standard" English spoken by leaders like Obama when the situation requires it.　

     Also, as Sen. Reid implied, favoring lighter-skinned blacks socially and politically remains a discriminatory practice of many Americans, both white and black.　 Reid simply told the truth.　 So did Dr. Lick.　

     "Political correctness" shouldn’t supersede plain truth or plain justice.　

　　　　　　

     Contact Dr. Telford at 313-460-8272 or drjohntelford@mi.rr.com. 

A word to the revolutionaries to come

Dear predominantly liberal and a few conservative friends,

As most of you know, I was an All-American and world-ranked sprinter in my checkered youth, and now in my mid-seventies more than half-a-century later, I am about to finish my metaphorical leg of a relay race in which I now pass the baton to you progressive, mostly younger, mostly liberal  "runners" who will run what may well be the societal anchor leg--the last leg for the remnants of us true liberal all-American activists.  I invite you to forward this post to sympathetic liberals and indeed even to conservatives of your acquaintance who care about the future of American-style democracy.

 Much of the American liberal class has essentially sold out to the corporations.  Now we must pray that President Barack Obama will grow some huge cojones and stand up to the cowardly Philistines in his own party that has an ass as its symbol, as well as to those in the pachydermous party of the Republicans who have briskly set about dismantling our democracy with their unwillingness to tax those among us who are the most fortunate--with the accent on "fortune."  You relatively few individuals whom I address in this post (plus some additional individuals whom I shall perhaps address in subsequent forwarded emails, as well as in additional communications) are progressive activists or potential activists who have the interest, brain power, and drive to reactivate and redirect the "liberal class."  As most of you know, it is as a member of this class that I have been a revolutionary anti-establishment, anti-institutional, counter-corporate member for all of my life.  (So were my freedom-loving Scotland-born father and grandfather before me--at considerable economic and indeed sometimes physical cost, I might add, to all three of us.)  

Many conservatives, numerous affiliates of the Tea Party, and others who are politically right-of-center either worship the power-elite uncritically (and thus self-sacrificially) or else are themselves clinging--albeit precariously--to the lower fringes of the power-elite.  What is less known but is becoming starkly and increasingly recognized (and regarding which I therefore feel I must emphasize now and sound a relevant clarion warning bell) is that the American LIBERAL class as we have known it is indeed selling out now as well to the mega-corporations that control the world's wealth and that loot, exploit, and oppress the common man, the downtrodden, children, women, and the aged, infirm, and impoverished in Detroit, in Michigan, across America, and indeed throughout our planet.  This makes me worry about the futures of my son Steve and my daughter Katherine, and the futures of my grandson RJ and my granddaughter Tori--as it should also make you worry about the futures of your children and grandchildren and indeed the future of our embattled country.  

Let me exemplify for you a (seemingly) relatively insignificant symptom/result of this (I will doubtless cite other symptoms in later emails), to wit:  

Frighteningly, the Republican Governor of Michigan has appointed an emergency manager for the imploding Detroit Public Schools and afforded him dictatorial powers to void legally-agreed-upon contracts and dissolve the union--thus simultaneously disenfranchising Detroit voters, including me.  This process could presently be duplicated in other school districts and municipalities--and ultimately perhaps even in some state governments throughout the nation.  I submit that this violates the United States Constitution and sets a perilous precedent that enables the encroachment of totalitarianism in the United States of America.    

Relatedly, the toadying corporatization of numerous members of the once intellectually independent and vigorously activist liberal class, among whom have historically numbered  academic, municipal, faith-based, trade-union, arts-based, financial, political and indeed Democratic leaders, has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture, as Dr. Chris Hedges, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and I have both been asserting in recent years.  Hedges correctly observes that the decline of newspapers--along with that of book-publishing, coupled with the degradation of our educational system for all but the elite few--has created a culture in which verifiable fact, which is rooted in the complexity and discipline of print, no longer forms the basis of public discourse.  It has been supplanted by the blogosphere, the various arms of the Internet, cable TV, and corporation-dominated and domesticated "newspapers" which now have become virtual trade journals.  Print-based culture--in which fact and assertion can be traced and distinguished--has ceded to a culture of "emotionally-driven narratives" where facts and opinions are interchangeable.   

As Hedges observes, once reality is disconnected from print, it is no longer placed in context.  This has left dissidents like me (and some of you) speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society and prevent us from being able to guard against threats to the well-being of ordinary Americans.  

The John Telford Superhero!

How about this folks;? Yours truly as a superhero comic book character! Personally I like the bearded version best, but hey who's going to be picky? How many times in your life do you get to be a superhero? Thanks to my good friend Larry Ryan for these wonderful illustrations.

                                                   

Telford's Telescope April 2012 Edition

Here is this month's Telford's Telescope newsletter. Feel free to tell me what you think, or even offer suggestions!

Detroit's sands are shifting like quicksand

Note: This post originally appeared as a column in the March 2012 edition of Detroit Native Sun.

One night in 2009 at Detroit’s Scarab Club, I read an excerpt from A Life on the RUN – Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice, my tell-all memoir on our troubled city and schools. Local poet Laura Apel told the audience that it’s good to write autobiographical poetry, too — and she read her most personal and gripping poem, which inspired me to pen this one, titled "Shifting Sands":

In nascent 1950s nether lands,

I sported speed — stocked sheer

within my bones,

Consuming it and burning it with glee,

While beating the best

sprinters in the world.

Then blazing yet, I after-burned it still,

Down dwindling days, in dedicated thrall

To man- and womankind (the latter long,

And far too much indeed, I need to say).

The current leaders in suburban schools

Where years before I’d brought

Black principals

Lent no strong hand enabling

children there

To hear our young Black

president’s address.

My castle crumbled so, in shifting sands.

Yet my cause consumes me even now—

And on one sunless, late November day,

A slouching lout ingenuously scrawled

On borrowed loose-leaf in

his all-Black class,

"Doctor T., you cool—you be the man!"

His old re-treaded teacher duly basks

And glories in that priceless scrap of scrawl

I fasten to my overflowing heart—

With dreams untold, in ever-shifting sands.

 In my poem, I was referring to a speech President Obama made to the nation that some school districts in white neighborhoods wouldn’t let their students hear.　 This poem actually manages to squeeze my memoirs’ 430 pages into just those eighteen lines of iambic pentameter—but you still need to get the book to view the whole picture!　 Anthony Neely, a press secretary to then-Mayor Dennis Archer, pronounced it the best book on Detroit he has ever read, and Archer himself called it "Spellbinding."　　　

You also need to get What OLD MEN Know, my newest book, because in addition to making savage fun of the Republicans (Congressman Clarke ordered a copy for every Democrat in Congress), it contains "timeless wisdom," according to Dr. Wayne Dyer.　

　　　　

The sands may not be shifting yet in the suburbs, but they’re definitely shifting now in Detroit—for the worse.　 Our city teeters over the abyss of Legislature-mandated receivership, and Lansing continues its decade-long hijacking of the schools by assigning non-educators and non-Detroiters to run them and rename them to kill our sense of community.　 Under their "leadership," they have plunged our once-nationally predominant district to the lowest ebb in its 143-year history. 

However, while education secretary Arne Duncan has pronounced us "educational ground zero," and a recent survey called our city the most violent in America, it is well to remember that we aren’t alone among urban centers.　 New York has many teachers on long-term layoff from shuttered schools, Los Angeles’ gangs are out of control, and Chicago’s teen violence problem proportionately approaches ours. Unquestionably, though, the ultimate key to our city’s rebirth lies in our public schools.　 We’ve got to take them back from the corporate crocodiles.　 Detroit’s future depends on it.