While black political leaders and activists focus on turning off Fox News, and clownish disputes with Tea Partyers and the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, are they missing something more important? Can any good come from a Democratic president reaching across the aisle to team up with Republicans for a bipartisan “fiscal reform” that targets “entitlements,” meaning Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security? Is the silence of black leadership on the president's Cat Food Commission still more evidence of their irrelevance?

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Left writers have been reporting for years that U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda bear primary responsibility for the deaths of as many as six million Congolese. Now a leaked United Nations report has confirmed that Rwanda’s crimes in Congo may rise to the level of genocide, since President Paul Kagame’s forces killed Hutu elderly, children and women without regard to nationality. Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s “mentors and funders in the U.S. government…must be held equally accountable.”

by Benjamin Woods

The real Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remains quite accessible to us, through his writings and a wealth of other material. However, King’s political likeness is not to be found among the current Black leadership class. Therefore, “it is on those who believe in his vision today to build a real social movement for a revolutionary transformation of human society.”

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

If American whites practiced what many of them preach to Muslims, they would ban themselves from building cultural institutions of any kind in much of the United States, since so many places are sites of depraved atrocities and mass killings of people of color by whites. Or, are only white folks’ “sensitivities” to be respected? Where is “hallowed ground” for descendants of Black slaves and Native Americans?

by Anthony Monteiro

Elite educational institutions are turning out a bumper crop of neo-liberal Black intellectuals who are anything but “new.” Charles Pete Banner-Haley has much more in common with Booker T. Washington than the iconic Black intellectual and activist, W.E.B. Du Bois. “A new talented tenth” has emerged from mostly white universities, “which attempts to straddle the ideological divide between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois. They claim Du Bois in words, but substantively are Bookerites.”