🧟‍♂️One Terrible Pot 🇺🇸

I knew both Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon (RIP to both) of Black Agenda Report. Both supported my work during the Obama years. Bruce later criticized ADOS as too nationalist and anti-immigrant, but he respected me enough to CALL me before publishing his critique. That’s what intellectual integrity looked like. And both Glen and Bruce believed political people actually DID political things. They believed in organizing, building institutions, and confronting power. One of Bruce’s criticisms of ADOS was that he didn’t believe we would ever build real chapters or an organizational infrastructure. He was wrong. We did both. But even his criticism was rooted in the belief that politics demanded more than rhetoric. I hate saying how dead people would respond to anything, but both men’s essays are still available, and I suspect they would have had very little patience for FD Signifier’s milquetoast, sloppy, political commentary masquerading as radical analysis. So watching FD Signifier bastardize their work on the Black Misleadership Class is astonishing. Glen and Bruce were serious socialist radicals whose critique of capitalism was central to their politics. To watch FD “it’s lit over here” Signifier borrow their language while emptying it of its ideological substance, and then presenting that as some profound political analysis, is an insult to their intellectual legacy. I’m genuinely floored by it. You don’t get to appropriate the intellectual tradition of people who spent their lives challenging power while reducing politics to commentary, branding, and content creation. Y’all don’t despise FD enough. If you want to really understand this stuff, read Adolph Reed’s books, starting with “Class Notes”. He actually created the phrase “racial brokerage politics”. I’m a harsh critic of Booker T Washington, but you can’t criticize him selling out or ‘buying in’ without also seriously interrogating his funding of Black radical journalist T. Thomas Fortune, including secretly helping finance his newspaper, The New York Age. Go read Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and then the primary sources. FD Signifier is simply a hack.

Went from “We Wuz Kings & Queens” to “We Wuz Here First”

People will honestly work to destroy your reputation just so they can steal your work, because destroying Black celebrity worship is what Antonio & I have been doing for a decade.

We need an internal moral reckoning in the #ADOS community because 50 Cent has always been awful, but too many people giggled right along & rewarded his behavior. A community unwilling to establish moral standards, enforce boundaries, and ostracize bad actors will eventually be defined by them.