No One Listening Is O.K.: I Don't Have To Win Elections

"We have the Ani DiFranco drama. Yes, public outrage shut down her ridiculous retreat at a slave plantation. Yet Nottoway Plantation remains open, emerging from the PR wreckage largely unscathed. The plantation was even able to continue portraying itself as a benign educational site, despite the fact that it’s nothing more than a racist shrine to the “good old days”. For Nottoway Plantation, a successfully managed scandal is just free publicity.

I don’t want people to stop talking about these issues, they are important. However, are these discussions providing us with real analysis of oppression, or is it just shallow posturing? I’m not entirely sure."

“Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) transformed the way we understand the legacy of slavery and colonization in Sub-Saharan Africa,....

...The premise of Rodney’s historical socio-economic analysis,... is that the poverty and inequalities of Sub-Saharan Africa are reflections of historical relationships of exploitation. This exploitation, he argues, was total: countries were dispossessed of all resources deemed useful to Europeans, including human labour.

In his assessment of pre-colonial and colonial European systems of exploitation, Rodney demands that readers confront the historical roots of ‘underdevelopment’ and he challenges us to rethink global history through Africa, self-emancipation and the politics of domination and resistance.”

“The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.”