"Empire," A Rock Around Our Necks

Last week, the Fox network show "Empire" continued to gain popularity, breaking its previous weeks' records. This is the headline I saw in an online magazine: "Empire’ Ratings Hit New Demo & Viewership Highs In Final Numbers – Update." (link below)

Just moments before coming across this story, I watched a Fox News pundit pumping viewers to tune in to his interview with Wisconsin's governor scott walker (lowercase intended). So, one minute I'm watching a Fox-head declare scott walker the forerunner for the Republican presidential candidacy, and a few minutes later I'm reading about Fox's big score with "Empire" -- at which point, I am scratching my head.

Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard, and Lee Daniel ("The Butler") must be over the moon! And who else ... who else, I wonder? 

Why, Rupert Murdoch, of course!

When, oh, when will my people start putting our money where our mouths are? African Americans have a long, long haul ahead of us. It's a tiring thought, so tiring. We think we don't. We think we have arrived. Yet, we've set in motion our own future, with our laissez-faire engagement with government, politics, and power. 

Here's to the radical thinkers on whose boldness and courage we will rely. I hear them on WPFW often. Years later we will build monuments to them, no doubt, celebrate their conscientious stature and brag about their heroism, about how courageous and prophetic they were. One group among us, the rich and famous whom we call our nobility, will be counting their money ... while Ferguson burns on. 

I'm not alone in my concern. The link to a critical commentary of the show, by Boyce Watkins, also is below.

"Empire’ Ratings Hit New Demo & Viewership Highs In Final Numbers – Update"
http://deadline.com/2015/02/empire-ratings-rise-up-lee-daniels-danny-strong-fox-1201381970/

"Dr. Boyce Watkins: Why I Refuse to Support the Coonery of the Show 'Empire'"  http://financialjuneteenth.com/dr-boyce-watkins-why-i-refuse-to-support-the-coonery-of-the-show-empire/

What Will It Take?

Troy Davis has been executed by the American justice system.

This, while we sit on our good government jobs and hide within our gated, so-called communities and make excuses for greedy and corrupt leaders right here in our backyard ... because we think we have arrived and the Troy Davises of this world can't touch us.


If Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery boycotters, Bayard Rustin, and the many freedom fighters of that era had depended on us to speak up, to march, to say no, to resist the power structure, to join them in the struggle for justice, they would have made no progress at all. 


All we want to do is pretend we have ascended to some high seat where humanity and justice are insignificant, where all that matter are how much money we make and what our neighborhood is called and where we shop and what schools we attended and whose parties we get invited to and who our pastor is and how powerful we must be for having elected a black president.


In fact, we might be the most ignorant "educated" people in the history of the world. Do we not know yet that money cannot buy our freedom?


Do I hear Spike Lee screaming "WAKE UP!!"? Speak up. Let somebody know.

(a word from Prince George's County, MD)