By Oscar H. Blayton Joe Biden Stinks! His hypocrisy and chronic tone-deafness are blistering assaults on my humanitarian sensibilities. Here is a politician who presents himself as a friend to people of color, even though in the 1970s, as a U.S. senator, he supported anti-busing legislation. In fact, in 1978, he, along with Delaware’s Republican senator, William V. Roth Jr., offered an amendment to an elementary and secondary education funding bill that would have halted equality in education through busing. This amendment would have “stayed” all pending busing orders, including a cross-district busing plan scheduled to go into effect in…
Author: Oscar H. Blayton
By Oscar H. Blayton For almost a decade, Americans have been scratching their heads over the meteoric rise of Donald J. Trump’s political career. When then-Congressman Keith Ellison appeared on the July 26, 2015, edition of ABC’s “This Week” and warned that Donald Trump could become the Republican presidential nominee for the 2016 presidential election, the program’s host, George Stephanopoulos, laughed along with the show’s other panelists and stated, “I know you don’t believe that.” Now, eight years after Keith Ellison’s warning, America has witnessed multiple instances of Donald Trump’s deplorable behavior and suffered through an ugly period while Trump…
By Oscar H. Blayton 2022 will be remembered as the year European museums began to return stolen and looted artifacts to the African cultures to whom they belonged. But while some physical items are finding their way back home, the stolen histories and legacies of African people remain locked away in the dungeons of white supremacy. The centuries-old practice of European appropriation of African culture and achievement has, not surprisingly, created a keen sense of suspicion within the African diaspora towards European assertions of racial classifications of historical figures. The discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in November…
By Oscar H. Blayton In recent years, people have begun to spend more time contemplate the meaning and significance of statuary. Statues of perpetrators of Europe’s colonial expansion and racist legacies began to tumble in the United States and England as descendants of colonized and enslaved people of color brought attention to the human misery afflicted by those who likenesses dotted urban parks and courthouse lawns. As statues of widely recognized racists such as Christopher Columbus were brought down from their pedestals, so too was the artwork venerating lesser-known racists such as the surgeon J. Marion Sims, known as the…
By Oscar H. Blayton If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. On July 30, 1864, more than 16,500 Union soldiers were aligned against only 9,500 Confederate seditionists in Petersburg, Virginia. In addition to its greater numbers, the Union had the element of surprise on its side. For weeks, Union forces had been tunneling under the Confederate line and finally filled the hole with explosives. On the day of the battle, a fuse was lit, and 4 tons of gunpowder exploded, breeching a hole in the Confederate defenses by destroying one of their artillery batteries…
By Oscar H. Blayton “The kitchen don’t lie” was a saying I heard often during my childhood. In the 1950s in my part of Virginia, Saturday evenings saw a lot of African American sisters finish washing the dinner dishes and place a hot comb on top of the stove and begin to “do hair,” getting ready for Sunday service. This weekly ritual gave rise to the term “the kitchen” when referring to those hairs at the nape of the neck that were too short to straighten with a hot comb. This label also was used in the practice of gauging the…