Africa - Where the Next US Oil Wars Will Be?

The latest issue of Black Agenda Report, dated February 28, 2007 is now available on the internet at www.blackagendareport.com.

Africa - Where the Next US Oil Wars Will Be?
by Bruce Dixon

On Feb. 7 George Bush announced the formation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command charged with planning and executing its oil and resource wars on the African continent under the pretext of combating "terrorism". What does this mean to African Americans? And to Africans? BAR consults Prexy Nesbitt, an architect of the international campaigns against apartheid in the 70s and 80s, to find out.
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Freedom Rider: Top Ten Questions for Would Be Presidents
by Margaret Kimberley

Although only Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, among Democratic presidential hopefuls, can rightfully claim to be a progressive, the rest of the pack will eventually have to face scrutiny from the party's grassroots "base." Under no circumstances should the political evaluation process be left to shallow corporate media and celebrity chatter. Ms. Kimberley has assembled a list of ten questions with which to challenge the candidates, ranging from Katrina to Iraq to national health care.
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The Letters Column
by our readers, and Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor

A Looming Intra-Black Civil War?
The Tavis Show -- Where Is It Leading?
The Contemptible Condoleezza Rice
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New Orleans: The Right to Return, 18 Months Later
by Bill Quigley

A year and a half after Katrina, much of New Orleans remains in ruins, with government at all levels actively preventing reconstruction that would allow hundreds of thousands of exiles to return. Locals refer to the devastation as having "the Grand Canyon effect" - when you see it in person it can take your breath away. Yet amidst official cruelty and callous neglect, volunteers feed hundreds of thousands of meals to their neighbors, and thousands of non-Louisianans donate their time and skills in the struggle to resurrect a city that was left to die.
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White as ‘Average’ and ‘Normal’
by Seth Sandronsky

If being white in America is "normal" then what are the rest of us? A recent Salt Lake City shopping mall shooting spree by a young white man described as "average"-looking once again reveals the "white-as-normative" syndrome as pervasive in American life. Inevitably, it seems, whites are shocked to witness insane, homicidal behavior by people that look like them, while appearing to anticipate in advance anti-social conduct from non-whites.
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The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
by Milton Allimadi

As European powers consolidated their colonial conquests in Africa, their book-writers and journalists churned out volumes of justifications for white supremacy. Not only were Africans unfit for self-rule, said the racial propagandists, Blacks were "too low down, too completely severed from the white," to even express indignation at being reduced to non-persons in their own countries. White writers were so brazen as to judge which African groups were most or least attractive and intelligent - praising the Masai, for example, as coming closest in appearance to "very respectable Europeans" while describing other Africans as "ape-like creatures." After generations of defamation, Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora were arguing among themselves over who "is closer to the white man."
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The Black Stake in Iraq Withdrawal and Bush Impeachment
by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

If the Iraq war is allowed to continue, the chances for achieving any of the goals of the Black political and economic agenda will dwindle to nil. And if George Bush is permitted to serve out his second stolen term in office without even the threat of punishment for his daily shredding of the Constitution, African Americans will be left near-naked to future assaults by an unrestrained white majority. Impeachment and Iraq withdrawal should be top priorities for African Americans, who have the most to lose from presidential lawlessness and U.S. imperial policy.
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