Black politics are key to recognizing the most important social dynamics of the United States. Over the past forty years, no commentator has been as deeply insightful about the paradoxes and personalities of Black American public life as the journalist and radio host Glen Ford.

In this stunning overview, Ford draws from his work for Black Agenda Report, one of the most incisive and perceptive publications of the progressive left, to examine competing struggles for class power and identity in the Black movement. In a survey stretching from the violent gentrification of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, through the engineered bankruptcy of Detroit, to the "more effective evil" of the Obama presidency, Ford casts a caustic eye on the empty posturing and corruption of the Democratic Party. This, he insists, depends on a Black constituency for electoral success, while using a co-opted "Black misleadership class" to sell out working people's interests.

Profiling along the way storied Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Brown (for whom Ford once worked), The Black Agenda looks, too, beyond American shores, at US intervention in Libya, the Congo and the Middle East, showing how these are imbricated with racism at home. Ford concludes with a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement, setting out both its pitfalls and potentialities.

Reviews likely: The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The New Republic, Jacobin, CounterPunch

Interviews likely: Jacobin, On Contact with Chris Hedges, The Black Agenda Report

Excerpts likely: Jacobin, In These Times, Africa Is a Country, The Black Agenda Report

Book launch in New York

About the Author

Glen Ford, who died in July 2021, was executive director of Black Agenda Report and was previously co-founder of BlackCommentator.com. He had extensive experience in radio and television, where he launched influential programming such as America's Black Forum, the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television, and Rap It Up. Ford was national political columnist for Encore American & Worldwide News magazine and the author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media

Reviews

"A talented and brilliant writer, gifted with an acerbic sense of humor and uncompromising in his integrity and courage, he will be very hard to replace." - Chris Hedges

"Glen Ford is the most brilliant, courageous and consistent writer and journalist in the Black radical and independent tradition, of his generation - from the Sixties until now." -Cornel West

"Glen Ford was the consummate journalist, a man who demanded rigorous analysis of himself and others, and who lived by the dictum of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted." - Margaret Kimberley, co-founder, Black Agenda Report

"Scorching... These provocations raise hard-to-dismiss questions about the lack of true racial progress in America. Progressives will heed this full-throated rallying cry" - Publishers Weekly

"Glen Ford Carves Up the American Empire" - CounterPunch

"Deeply impressive.... Worth reading for the fascinating final section alone, which addresses Black Lives Matter, reparations and the American Left to bracing effect" - Tortoise

"A fearlessly honest truthteller... Glen wrote with unmatched erudition and knowledge" - Let's Try Democracy

Book Information
ISBN 9781682192900
Author Glen Ford
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint OR Books
Publisher OR Books