John Harwood Actually Told It Like It Is

It is not clear what Washington Examiner columnist and opinion writer Christopher Tremoglie means, when he caustically accuses Cable News Network (CNN) commentator John Harwood of sinking abysmally low because Mr. Harwood has dared to call a spade by its proper functional designation, by telling most of us avid students and first-hand witnesses and “experiencers” of the proverbial African-American Ordeal what we have always known and been rawly and shamelessly meted, in most cases, by the dominant White-Supremacist Society and Culture in which we have been immersed and been living for approximately a half millennium and counting. Which is the inescapable fact that the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, from the United States’ Court of Appeals to the august Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS), was heavily laced with perennially predictable right-wing racism from the membership of the Senate Republicans of the Upper-Chamber of the United States’ Congress (See “CNN’s John Harwood Sinks to New Low in Tweet about Ketanji Brown Jackson Confirmation” Washington Examiner 4/8/22).

There is absolutely no gainsaying the fact, even as the Harwood critic sharply and aptly points out, that there have always been inevitable ideological differences between the members of America’s two major political party establishments, namely, the Republican Party, the so-called Grand Old Party (GOP), and the Democratic Party, also informally known as the Donkey Party. Nevertheless, it would constitute the height of logical asininity and inexcusable hypocrisy for any critic, irrespective of ideological bent or suasion, to flagrantly overlook the fact that wherever and whenever the African-American Personality, both individually and collectively, is concerned, such normative differences as may be legitimately deemed to prevail or exist between members and operatives of our two major political parties become even more sharply drawn, often with the right-wing “Conservative” Republicans being smugly and self-righteously entrenched in their white-supremacist aversion towards the inclusion of African Americans at the highest echelons of the country’s political establishment, namely, the Presidency, the Judiciary and Congress, in particular the Upper-House of the United States’ Congress or Senate.

As CNN’s Mr. Harwood recently and flawlessly pointed out, the electoral divide between Senate Republicans and their Democratic Party counterparts in the confirmation of Mrs. Ketanji Brown Jackson to associate membership of the United States’ Supreme Court strikingly mirrored the ideological picture painted by these two white-dominated political parties in the landmark 1967 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American citizen and legal light to be so elevated onto a bench on the highest court of the land, as it were. Back then, as now, too, an overwhelming majority of US Senators from the Old Confederate South, that is, the White Supremacists who have always envisaged African Americans and global Africans to be divinely ordained slaves and donkeys for the rest of humanity, stood dead set against any meritorious attempt to seat this most wretched species of humanity on the Apex Court of the most powerful nation on Earth.

But, of course, we also need, for the sake of truth and objectivity, to underscore the fact that such sharp ideological differences at the highest echelons of power or the political establishment has not and has never perfectly or neatly been bifurcated between the Democratic and the Republican parties’ leaderships. Rather, they have tended to overlap with relatively preponderant spillovers, depending on whether the current wave of white-supremacist ideology had swung towards one major political party or the other. Now, what this means is that sometimes it was the Democratic Party that was the more ideologically conducive towards what has been termed as “Dixiecracy” or right-wing conservative white supremacy, while sometimes the exact opposite has been the case. I am also quite certain that CNN’s Mr. Harwood is politically and ideologically sophisticated enough to recognize the stark reality of the fact that rabidly anti-African racism right here in the United States of America is not and has never been immutably peculiar to either the Donkey or the Elephant party or ideological establishment.

Now, the fact of whether the only African-American Republican Senator, Mr. Timothy “Tim” Scott, of South Carolina, alongside of the latter state’s Senior Senator, Mr. Lindsey Graham, voted against the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to associateship of the SCOTUS or not is decidedly irrelevant, as indelibly embarrassing to the members of the global African community as it may be or might have come. There will also be “White Sheep” among the teeming ranks of the global African family and community. No more depraved or embarrassing than the strategically peevish and morally regressive nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas to the SCOTUS in 1991, as the second African-American male to be so “honored.” There will also be members of the global African community who, for reasons both obvious and not-so-obvious, may be perennially and eternally motivated towards invariably and intransigently undermining the greater and collective good of their people, often and almost invariably in favor of both the short-term and the long-term interests and objectives of their Aryan supremacist paymasters.

It is crystal clear that what CNN’s Mr. Harwood was referring to is that inveterate or psychologically and ideologically entrenched visceral hatred that some very powerful or highly politically placed white Americans harbor against the coequal humanity of the global African Personality. John Harwood, himself a bona fide American white man, must know what he is talking about.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 9, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]