[lbo-talk] Savior Of Color

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Sun Feb 29 13:42:16 PST 2004


M. Pugliese posted:

Dr. Johnetta Cole was an active cadre in the Venceremos Brigade, U.S. Grenada Friendship Society,Committee to Stop U.S. Aggression against Cuba, U.S. Peace Council and other CPUSA aligned "fronts" in the 70's and 80's. By the nineties she was on the Board of Directors for Coca-Cola and was on the Clinton transition team in '92 as, "Cluster coordinator for education, labor, and the arts and humanities."

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Uh huh, this is typical.

I wasn't aware of Dr. Cole's trajectory when I wrote my post, but I chose Coca Cola for a reason: during the 1980's when I was still compelled (being young) to listen to 'self-esteem boosting' speeches from an array of do-gooders -- mostly from local churches and 'Black enterprise' orgs -- Coca Cola was often mentioned as an object lesson of success.

Reportedly (I never bothered to check claims made during church meetings and school assemblies on self-esteem topics), Coca Cola was a 'progressive' firm which employed a relatively large percentage of African Americans in senior management positions.

The point -- always -- was that if we were good, we too might join an exciting corporation such as Coca Cola Bottling and, through honest, hard work (made possible by our strong self esteem) rise through the ranks, perhaps even taking a seat on the Board of Directors. Thus would 'Dr. King's Dream'(tm) of all Americans helping business achieve the apotheosis of profit be achieved.

For reasons I still don't fully understand, this deadly dull vision of Black success, which contained zero political content or systems analysis and was so attractive to so many of my buds, drove me to the library and into the venerable lap of Uncle Karl.

DRM



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