Ellis Cose

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Faith, fraud and embracing lies in the name of social justice

Ellis Cose

Until recently, I was blissfully unaware of Cheyenne Bryant’s existence. But for the past few weeks, I have watched with growing bemusement as the self-declared psychology expert faced a brutal reckoning. Bryant, who claims to have earned a PhD in psychology, has cultivated an impressive following by presenting herself as a sharp-tongued, glamorously (sometimes scantily) attired truth teller who excels at take downs of high-profile Black men with multiple children and no wife.

She gained visibility in 2023 and 2024 in a controversial stint as a life coach on VHI’s Basketball Wives. In the last couple of years, her profile has grown, largely because she has appeared on podcasts featuring famous men, including football heroes @ShannonSharpe and Cam Newton and entertainer @NickCannon.

On his own Funky Friday podcast, she labeled Newton’s behavior (fathering eight children with three women) as unfair, dysfunctional and selfish, and castigated him for creating "broken families." On Sharpe’s podcast, she ordered Sharpe to “grow the fuck up and give yourself a chance to love.”

In a series of media appearances promoting her new book, Live Your Promise, questions arose about her PhD degree. Bryant says she earned her degree from (the for-profit and partly online) Argosy University, which lost its accreditation in 2019 and, shortly thereafter, lost its federal funding before discontinuing operations altogether. Although a third party kept records for a while, access to those records soon vanished, says Bryant.

When pressed on lack of proof of her credentials on the @breakfastclubam podcast, Bryant announced, “For the folks who have already made up their minds to not like me ... I don’t give a fuck what your narrative is” and then repeated the story about not being able to obtain her papers. Unfortunately for her, a number of former Argosy students went online and proved the records were available from an academic records repository called Parchment.

Pressed in a subsequent interview, she replied, “I have multiple degrees and I’m not going to prove anything to anybody. My obedience is to God, not to people.” She cited her conversations with Cannon, Newton and Sharpe as proof of her effectiveness.

Subsequently—and perhaps predictably—she pointed to racism and jealousy as reasons for her perceived persecution: “Black people trying to cancel Black people. I think that is disgusting… It’s a representation of jealousy and enviousness… It’s not Christlike.”

Movie director and producer @tylerperry, speaking in her defense, noted that her apparent lack of a degree was “trending news” but “what is not trending is what this administration is doing about taking degrees from so many of us.”

Regressive as Donald Trump’s education policies are, not many people are buying the idea that Bryant’s predicament has anything to do with repression of Black achievers or envy at her accomplishments.

A military veteran suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder surfaced to say that she had paid Bryant several hundred dollars for a counseling session, but that Bryant made things worse: “I fell into depression after speaking with her because I wasn’t in a space to hear how I wasn’t a high value woman. I was looking for tools to learn and cope with what I was going through.”

The Rev. Jamal Bryant (no relation) apologized for having her on his podcast, during which she advised single women to take nude baths with men as a way of testing the men’s discipline. In his apology, Rev. Bryant, called her “uncredentialed” and “uncertified.”

The hoopla around Bryant led to the resurfacing of a tape of a program done with journalist and influencer Touré Neblett. In that show, Bryant suggested that “gentle parenting” did not work. Neblett responded, “If gentle parenting creates gentle children, sign me up. I definitely want to create more gentle adults, especially men.”

The retort triggered Bryant so powerfully that she forced the program to go into overtime as she assailed Neblett for being soft and feminine. She ended up screaming, “I’m not your wife, softie. Don’t talk to me like that… shut the fuck up talking to me like that.”

No reputable person in the psychology community advocates beating children. A review of 20 years of research in “physical punishment of children” published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2012 found that hitting children did not improve their behavior but made it worse.

It’s not just on child discipline that Bryant has exhibited ignorance of psychological research. Her vocabulary is not that of a trained mental health professional but instead seems to be a mishmash of New Age lingo, biblical concepts, manosphere drivel, pop psychology, and street smarts, leaning heavily on references to such things as low functioning men, high functioning women, pain pockets, healing journeys, and other concepts that have no place in serious psychological research.

One thing that seems missing is knowledge of the ten commandments, at least of the two that prohibit taking the name of the Lord in vain (which she does in declaring God will be the sole judge of her credentials) and bearing false witness against your neighbor (which would include the verbal abuse she unloaded on Neblett).

In the end, Bryant shows precisely what is wrong with the argument that so-called oppressed people must always protect their own, even when their own are con artists. Certainly, on the list of things that are wrong with the world, Cheyenne Bryant’s misrepresentations rank extremely low. Still, the hoopla around them provides an important reminder that anyone asking you to take them purely on faith, after having proven themselves unworthy of such faith, is asking you to betray your own principles and judgment. Nothing good can conceivably come from that.

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND GRIPES
I don’t much care who plays Helen of Troy. I assume that a director as gifted as Christopher Nolan��who is featuring Helen in his version of The Odyssey—picked an actress in sync with his particular vision. But I do care about the sloppy thinking and loaded racial assumptions that underlie the tsunami of criticism directed at Nolan for casting Lupita Nyong’o as the world’s most beautiful woman. Nyong’o, who is of Luo descent, was born in Mexico and raised largely in Nairobi.
Let’s agree, first of all, that the idea of anyone being the world’s most beautiful person is a bit absurd, given that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Also, let’s remember, the story of Helen of Troy is a fable about a make-believe woman abducted by a Trojan prince who probably never existed.
Helen (as conjured up either by Homer or someone else) was not fully of the mortal world. Her dad, Zeus, either seduced or raped her mother, Queen Leda of Sparta, after showing up as a swan. For what it’s worth, both Leda and Zeus were presumed to have dark, not blond, hair.
The major objection to Nyong’o is that she does not look the part. Is it conceivable that Nyong’o could be the offspring of a dark-haired woman and a god who can look like anything from a swan to a dragon and whose true form could not be safely viewed by human eyes?
There obviously are no photographs of Helen. And though she is described as “fair armed,” that could merely mean her complexion was not that of one who labored in the sun. The fact is, even if she existed, which she did not, we have no real idea what Helen looked like. But whatever she looked like, one could argue, she did not look African. Perhaps.
While Africans certainly lived in ancient Greece, there is no evidence that large numbers of them were in Sparta. So yes, if we imagine how this fictional half-god person should look, “like an African” is not the first thing that comes to mind. But how important is that? Helen has been played by many women who bore no resemblance to the blond-haired ideal that Nyong’o’s critics envision.
In Doctor Faustus (which was responsible for the immortal words, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”) , Elizabeth Taylor played Helen as a brunette. No one objected. That is not because anyone thought that Taylor looked like the “real” Helen (whatever that might mean), but because they could buy a beautiful British woman’s face as capable of lunching “a thousand ships.” Indeed, people also bought Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, even though it is obvious, from statues and busts modeled on the actual Cleopatra, that Taylor bore no resemblance to the real person. And does anyone seriously believe that Helen of Troy looked like a blond German woman? Of course not. Yet, there was no outcry when German actress Helen Kruger was chosen to play her in the movie Troy.
The problem with Nyong’o obviously is that she is not white. And the collateral assumption is that ancient Greeks were as racists as people are today, and that they therefore would never consider a Black woman to be a world-class beauty.
In fact, racism is a fairly modern invention. There is no evidence that the ancient Greeks suffered from that sin, and a lot of evidence that they did not. They were clearly aware that people came in different colors and with different features, but they seem not to have had deep racial feelings anything remotely like we do today.
It’s also worth remembering that race swapping, as it is now derisively called, has existed in cinema since the beginning. Pick virtually any cowboy and Indian movie and you will find scores of white people pretending to be Indians. Whites had absolutely no problem with that, although many Native Americans did. In 1911, a delegation representing Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes met with Washington officials to complain about movie stereotypes of Indians. A journalist covering the event wrote, “Big Buck and Big Bear … witnessed a western production which pictured an Indian girl as having fallen in love with a white man … Afterward finding that the man was married she stabbed his wife with a poisoned arrow in order that the man be able to marry her … It is hard to describe the look of disgust which' came over the faces of the red men at the show. Big Buck could hardly restrain his rage … "If the white people would only take the pains to study Indian characteristics," said Big Buck, "he could possibly produce something worthy of presentation to the public. This picture we have just seen is absolutely devoid of anything like what an Indian would do under the circumstances. The only thing like a real Indian in that picture are the feathers, the paint, and the bow and arrow. The woman who played the principal part has not the slightest conception of what an Indian Is like. I wager she has never seen one at close range.”
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic, The Birth of a Nation, (originally called The Clansmen) was met by widespread acclaim, although it was generally hated by Blacks, since the only Blacks featured in the movie were whites in blackface who were portrayed as rapists, murderers, savages, and idiots. The NAACP unsuccessfully campaigned to have the film banned. The NAACP complained that the film “serves to revive the differences and the causes of differences between the North and the South which led to Civil War. It opens afresh the wounds long healed by time, patience and forbearance … The sacred cause of Liberty is caricatured, made ridiculous and repulsive.”
Mickey Rooney in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s also drew criticism from nonwhites, as Rooney, in ridiculous yellowface makeup, played a Japanese character, Mr. Yunioshi, strictly for laughs at the Asian character’s expense.
Such movies, of course, are from the pre-enlightenment era, where minority characters were generally presented in demeaning ways. Whites, for the most, were fine with that. There was no band of conservative gatekeepers demanding that such practices cease.
The problem today is with race-swapping in the opposite direction. It is with people of color playing roles that should supposedly be reserved solely for whites. So, there is anger at the mere idea of a partly-Latina Snow White, or a Black Little Mermaid. There was even outrage in certain circles when an interracial actress was given the role of Rue in the 2012 film The Hunger Games, even though author Suzanne Collins made it clear in her novel that Rue had “dark brown skin and eyes.” Many critics ignorantly nonetheless assumed that the “real” Rue must be white.
This supposed rule that fictional characters traditionally imagined as or portrayed as white can only and forever be played by members of one race is an insult to the imagination of creative artists. There is no law or rule of art that says once a character is largely accepted that character can never be reconceived in any way. That notion is as intellectually bankrupt as the idea that race swapping is fine only when it is whites playing other races for ridicule, but never when it is people of color playing roles traditionally denied them. Would the play Hamilton actually have been better if creator Lin-Manuel Miranda had insisted on casting white actors for all the major roles?
Elon Musk and his fellow critics of the trend are, of course, entitled to their opinion. But Musk, of all people, should be aware that the age of apartheid ended for a reason. And as nostalgic as he may be for a return to those days, that age is dead and gone.

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Time to Invade Cuba?
Federal prosecutors have announced the indictment of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and others for the deaths of four U.S. nationals.
Here’s some context. In the mid-1990s, a group of Cuban exiles formed Brothers to the Rescue. The group took on the mission of rescuing people from Cuba and claimed, eventually, to have helped over 2,000 Cubans escape. They also flew missions dropping anti-Castro propaganda on Cuba, in the apparent hopes of starting an uprising.
Two of those planes were shot down, resulting in the deaths.
Martin Garbus, who became an appellate lawyer in the case, describes the incident in his book, North Of Havana.
“Right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami cried for justice. Politicians called for the indictment of Castro; some even called for the invasion of Cuba. The FBI and federal prosecutors in Miami found it through their pursuit of five members of a Cuban spy ring called the Wasp Network (La Red Avispa). None of them were based in Cuba. None flew a MiG. None planned the attack. But … Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, and Rene Gonzalez—who came to be known as the Cuban Five—were arrested in Miami, and eventually tried and convicted for spying; one of them received two life sentences for his alleged connection with the shoot down.”
Why were the Cuban Five prosecuted. As Garbus tells the story, “Justice for the Brothers to the Rescue pilots had become la causafor Miami’s right-wing exiles. Evidence didn't matter. The government charged Castro's spies with espionage … [Nine] months later, federal prosecutors charged Hernández—the leader of the spy network and the only one of its members who had direct contact with the Cuban government—with the additional crime of conspiracy to commit murder. Their thinking was, if they squeezed Hernandez hard enough, they would get him to say something that would serve as the basis for an indictment of Fidel Castro, which is what powerful, well-financed anti-Castro exiles had demanded from the start.”
Imagine, for a second, how Trump would respond if some group in Cuba sent planes to the United States to drop leaflets slamming his Administration and urging citizens to overthrow the American government. Trump, of course, would respond with fury. He would order the planes shot from the sky and threaten to blow Cuba off the face of the earth.
Reflect on this. The Trump Administration, which has charged Raúl Castro and his cronies with four deaths, is the same Administration that, without sharing a shred of evidence, has killed an estimated 190 or so people whom Trump claims were drug smugglers. All we know for sure is that they were people from Venezuela, Colombia, and countries whose citizens Trump deemed unworthy of trial before their execution.
Now, it seems the Administration is eyeing this 30-year-old case as a pretext to pound an already starving people into submission—simply to serve the ego of Donald Trump. Madness; but a brand of madness we are getting used to.

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Does Democracy Have to Burn?

So, here we are, on the precipice of America’s 250th anniversary; and we still can’t get this voting thing straight. Simple as the process should be, we are bedeviled by an ugliness in our history that controls us even as we claim to have broken free.
In one of the most important judicial decisions of the current age, the Supreme Court in April greenlighted brazen racism in the redistricting process (as long as race was not explicitly acknowledged to be the motive), setting off a fierce race among states of the Old Confederacy to disenfranchise Black voters.
Edward Foley, former Ohio Solicitor General, called it “a singularly horrendous decision.” But the ruling was not exactly a surprise.
For some time, Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that a law protecting Black voters was obsolete. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision (which began the Court’s evisceration of the Act), Roberts wrote, “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare,” which, in Roberts’s mind justified gutting the Voting Rights Act. That would have been fine if his assumption was rooted in fact. But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in dissent, Roberts utterly failed “to grasp why the VRA has proven effective.”
In last month’s decision (Louisiana v. Callais), Samuel Alito declared that the Constitution permitted discrimination against members of another political party but generally frowned upon discrimination by race. Clarence Thomas celebrated Alito’s embrace of a “color-blind Constitution” and the end of “this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting-rights jurisprudence.”
As Ruth Ginsburg suggested, America has a long history of declaring that anti-discrimination laws unfairly discriminate against whites. Months after the end of the Civil War, as Reconstruction took shape, white resentment raged in the South. Andrew Johnson, the bigoted, North Carolina native who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president railed against Congress’s passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In his veto message, Johnson insisted the legislation was “in favor of the colored and against the white race.”
Outrage at people of color for supposedly ruining things for whites isn’t limited to rejection of civil rights laws. The Trump Administration has loudly crusaded against anything it feels unnecessarily favors people of color—whether it is immigration laws that supposedly encourage violent Black and Brown criminals to sneak over the border or hiring practices aimed at making the workplace more diverse.
Despite what the Trump and his allies would have you believe, practically no one of any sex or color wants violent criminals pouring across the border or unqualified women and people of color being given jobs they can’t competently perform. But the president’s animosity to DEI can’t possibly stem from a conviction that only the most qualified people should be hired for important jobs. Trump, after all, is the same president who routinely hires the least qualified, most incompetent white people he can find. He hired a Secretary of Defense with a reputation as a notoriously poor manager with no relevant experience whose sole claim to fame was having been a Fox News talking head. He hired as Secretary of Health and Human Services a man known for his famous name and crackpot theories with no relevant scientific or medical credentials. Indeed, he had filled his Cabinet and the upper echelons of government with people whose primary qualification was blind allegiance to Donald Trump, with competence being wholly optional. With the possible exception of the bourbon-swilling person of color he hired to run the FBI, it’s impossible to imagine how pure DEI hires could have been any worse.
Nonetheless, Trump and his minions have gone on a crusade to fire Black federal workers. Not since Woodrow Wilson’s time has federal personnel policy been so rooted in cynicism and bigotry. A Virginia native largely raised in the segregated South, Wilson argued that racial separation created a more harmonious workplace. In 1913, his first year in office, he reinstituted segregation and overt racism in federal hiring and promotion.
His actions drew a rebuke from Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post and a founder of the NAACP, who pointed out that while running for president in 1913, Wilson had declared, “Should I be­come President of the United States, they [Negro people] may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the in­terests of their race in the United States.”
“This utterance gave complete satisfaction to those leaders of the colored people and the friends of the race who were urging them to break away from their thralldom to the Republican party and to vote for the Governor of New Jersey on the ground that the country would profit most by the election of the Democratic ticket,” noted Villard. Instead, Wilson’s Administration was characterized by “a distinct hostility to the colored people.” Even jobs that had customarily been given to Blacks, including diplomatic posts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, were denied: “Under Mr. Wilson both of these posts have gone … to white men. The colored people at large accepted this as notice from the White House that the remaining offices heretofore given to colored men were to be taken from them.”
Villard went on to note, “eye-witnesses have told of colored women shut off in an unpleasant alcove in one office; of others quietly forced out of the lunch-room they had been using for nine years past and compelled to go into lavatories at the lunch-hour, of men clerks segregated behind lockers in one corner of a room in the dead-letter division of the Post-Office Depart­ment … The assignment of separate toilet-rooms to the races under threats of prompt punish­ment for failure to obey the rules has been another of the deeply humiliating features of the Washington segregation…. It is as if the great Govern­ment of the United States had gone out of its way to stamp them publicly as lepers, as physically and morally con­tagious and unfit for association with white people.”
A century later, a research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Wilson’s betrayal of Black federal workers led not only to heartache but to “a relative decline in the home ownership rate of black civil servants.”
Thank God Trump doesn’t have the power to reimpose segregation. But in December, several federal workers filed a class action suit accusing his Administration of illegal firings “intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce people of color, women, non-binary employees, and those, like Plaintiffs, who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups.” A second suit, in April, by a Black former member of the National Transportation Safety Board claiming he was fired because of his race, alleged that 75 percent of Black officials at independent agencies have been fired under Trump.
For good measure, Trump had also implemented an immigration purge conspicuously targeting Black and Brown immigrants. This is the president, of course, who denied and finally acknowledged, this year, that he complained to senators during his first term about the influx of Black and Brown people. “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden … Denmark?” he asked, instead of taking them from places like Somalia: “Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
(Out of curiosity, I called a Norwegian friend and asked whether his countrymen were eager to immigrate to the United States. He laughed and replied, “Even traveling to the United States for holiday has become unthinkable for most Norwegians. Trump is putting the entire planet at risk. Then there is the lack of care for his citizens… It’s hard to imagine anyone other than a tech genius or an astronaut eager to settle in the U.S.”)
Obviously , the problems facing America do not begin and end with Trump. We exist in a time when crony capitalism is devouring democracy. The New Yorker recently estimated that Trump and his immediate family had increased their wealth by some four billion dollars as a direct result of his presidency. That is not even counting the billions that Trump’s son in law has been given, nor the deals awarded to wealthy businessmen for bribing and playing ball with Trump. Nor the millions that Trump reportedly made on the stock market betting on outcomes he essentially controlled.
This marriage of governmental power and personal profit is not the way the American government is supposed to operate. Government is supposed to put a brake on corporate amorality, not eagerly succumb to it. This is not at all what the Founders had in mind—something worth noting as we celebrate this Semiquincentennial.
In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton proudly, almost giddily, laid out his vision. The Electoral College stemmed from the belief that the president was far too powerful and consequential to be selected by ordinary men. The esteemed leader should be chosen by men free of bias or political prejudices, men “capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station,” reasoned Hamilton, men walled off from “tumult and disorder.” These exceptional men, endowed with “moral certainty,” would meet in their individual states (beyond the likely “heats and ferments” of a national meeting), and ensure that the office of president would “never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications
That is not at all what we ended up with. Instead, we ended up with Trump—a man who thinks it is perfectly fine to sue the government that he controls, and then essentially negotiate with himself to set up a $1.776 billion slush fund to dole out to people of his choosing, such as those who, on his behalf, violently attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election. If you divide that $1.776 billion (a number presumably chosen to give a patina of patriotism to a despicably traitorous act of presidential theft) and divide it among, say, 2,000 people, each gets nearly $900,000 (tax free) to aid in their mission of treason. In short, we, the American people, at Trump’s explicit direction, are expected to make bad citizens and convicted criminals wealthy as they try to destroy their country and its Constitution. And that is not the only multi-billion-dollar boondoggle blessed by the president as he prattles on about his gold-plated ballroom. His supporters don’t flinch at the notion of the president setting up a so-called Board of Peace, presumably controlled by Trump until he dies, with billions to disperse as he sees fit.
Why have we come to this? That question is far too complicated to explore in this short essay. But as we prepare to celebrate our 250th anniversary, we owe it to ourselves, as Americans and thinking human beings, to ponder why we have wandered so far from the selfless, citizen-empowering vision of America that inspired the world—and what the road back might look like.
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[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Fake News of the Day

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Anti-Racists Spreading Racism?
Could one of America’s more revered civil rights organizations be actively supporting white supremacists? Is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s fight for equal justice just a cover for aiding random bigots, the KKK and American Nazis?
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche certainly seems to believe so. In indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center, Blanche accused SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” While “vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups,” the organization was actually funding the facilitation of “state and federal crimes.”
It’s a shocking accusation: a bit like accusing abolitionists of selfishly fighting slavery solely for financial gain. But is it true?
Certainly, SPLC’s crusade has sometimes focused on money. In 2008, SPLC’s lawyers won $2.5 million from Klans of America. The case focused on Klan members who had beaten and permanently injured a teenager of Panamanian descent. SPLC’s victory was celebrated in progressive circles and the organization proclaimed to be world-class Klan killers.
“Nearly six months after the Southern Poverty Law Center won a $2.5 million civil judgment against Kentucky-based Imperial Klans of America, the Klan group's membership has shriveled,” reported The Louisville Courier. After the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the verdict, Thomas Wells, a former president of the American Bar Association, dubbed SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, “the lawyer who bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan and effectively put them out of business.
Years before Blanche targeted the organization, critics accused SPLC of profiting from exaggerating the danger from largely harmless hate groups, of being obsessed with raising money, and of discriminating against its own staff. But Blache’s indictment goes far beyond that. It accuses SPLC of fostering the very evil it was created to combat. It’s a bit like blaming the NAACP’s undercover investigations of lynchings in the 1920s for Blacks being lynched in the South, or for blaming abolitionist critics and investigators for the myriad evils of slavery.
It nonetheless is a message that Blanche and many others in the Trump orbit seem determined to sell. As they see it, the biggest racial problem America has is people complaining of racism. And if those people would only shut up (and also stop stealing jobs and university slots from inherently more qualified white people), America’s racial problems would vanish. That such a view does not align very well with history only shows, in their eyes, that history must be rewritten. After all, is the notion that non-whites are the main perpetrators of racism any more farfetched than the notion that America was much better off when everyone understood it to be a white Christian nation that could only be diminished if it somehow tragically became less Christian and less white?

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Re-parenting Black children.
When I’m in a mood for righteous indignation, I often turn to broadcaster @Lawrence O’Donnell, who serves up outrage about as well as anyone. Last week when I caught his “The Last Word” (@TheLastWord), O’Donnell was so indignant I feared he might work himself up to a heart attack.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. had left O’Donnell in such an apoplectic state that he mused that even if he spent the entire rest of his career denouncing Kennedy, “it will be less than what he deserves.”
O’Donnell’s rant was in response to a heated exchange between Kennedy and Congresswoman Terri Sewell (@RepTerriSewell) of Alabama during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Sewell confronted Kennedy with his statement in a 2024 interview that Adderall and other drugs had rendered Black youths so unfit for society that “those kids are going to … go somewhere and get re-parented.” Sewell asked what Kennedy meant by that, and whether he had ever “reparented or parented” a Black child. Kennedy denied he ever said such things made the statements and accused Sewell of “just making stuff up.” Unfortunately for Kennedy, numerous broadcasters, including O’Donnell, aired the recording in which Kennedy suggested that Blacks were incapable of raising their own children.
When Ed Koch was mayor of New York, he and I customarily had lunch once or twice a year. During one such lunch, Koch suggested that a solution to the racial achievement gap might be to send children stuck in urban ghettos to more nurturing communities modeled on a kibbutz. I told him I thought the idea was both impractical and absurd, and pointed out that a country willing to invest in kibbutz-like havens for poor people or color would never have created racially isolated ghettos in the first place. As far-fetched as Koch’s suggestion was, I did not take it as attack on Black parents but as his attempt to think outside the box.
I have no idea what Kennedy was trying to suggest, as he seems incapable of consistent, coherent thought. Apparently, it never occurred to Kennedy that if Black people really were so awful at raising their own, millions of affluent white parents would not be hiring Black nannies to raise their precious children.
Obviously, not all Blacks parents are good at the job. Neither are all white or Asian parents. And the state has the power and responsibility to remove abused and neglected children from harmful environments. But the way to ensure children have a decent life is not by building re-parenting centers to take the place of Black parents; it is by helping parents acquire the resources and skills they need to do the job.
Yes, children of color do face special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious one is retaining their faith in themselves and in their society when confronted by gatekeepers like Kennedy who unfailingly see and condemn their threat and inadequacy but rarely foster or acknowledge their promise or potential.Re-parenting Black children.
When I’m in a mood for righteous indignation, I often turn to broadcaster @Lawrence O’Donnell, who serves up outrage about as well as anyone. Last week when I caught his “The Last Word” (@TheLastWord), O’Donnell was so indignant I feared he might work himself up to a heart attack.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. had left O’Donnell in such an apoplectic state that he mused that even if he spent the entire rest of his career denouncing Kennedy, “it will be less than what he deserves.”
O’Donnell’s rant was in response to a heated exchange between Kennedy and Congresswoman Terri Sewell (@RepTerriSewell) of Alabama during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Sewell confronted Kennedy with his statement in a 2024 interview that Adderall and other drugs had rendered Black youths so unfit for society that “those kids are going to … go somewhere and get re-parented.” Sewell asked what Kennedy meant by that, and whether he had ever “reparented or parented” a Black child. Kennedy denied he ever said such things made the statements and accused Sewell of “just making stuff up.” Unfortunately for Kennedy, numerous broadcasters, including O’Donnell, aired the recording in which Kennedy suggested that Blacks were incapable of raising their own children.
When Ed Koch was mayor of New York, he and I customarily had lunch once or twice a year. During one such lunch, Koch suggested that a solution to the racial achievement gap might be to send children stuck in urban ghettos to more nurturing communities modeled on a kibbutz. I told him I thought the idea was both impractical and absurd, and pointed out that a country willing to invest in kibbutz-like havens for poor people or color would never have created racially isolated ghettos in the first place. As far-fetched as Koch’s suggestion was, I did not take it as attack on Black parents but as his attempt to think outside the box.
I have no idea what Kennedy was trying to suggest, as he seems incapable of consistent, coherent thought. Apparently, it never occurred to Kennedy that if Black people really were so awful at raising their own, millions of affluent white parents would not be hiring Black nannies to raise their precious children.
Obviously, not all Blacks parents are good at the job. Neither are all white or Asian parents. And the state has the power and responsibility to remove abused and neglected children from harmful environments. But the way to ensure children have a decent life is not by building re-parenting centers to take the place of Black parents; it is by helping parents acquire the resources and skills they need to do the job.
Yes, children of color do face special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious one is retaining their faith in themselves and in their society when confronted by gatekeepers like Kennedy who unfailingly see and condemn their threat and inadequacy but rarely foster or acknowledge their promise or potential.Re-parenting Black children.
When I’m in a mood for righteous indignation, I often turn to broadcaster @Lawrence O’Donnell, who serves up outrage about as well as anyone. Last week when I caught his “The Last Word” (@TheLastWord), O’Donnell was so indignant I feared he might work himself up to a heart attack.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. had left O’Donnell in such an apoplectic state that he mused that even if he spent the entire rest of his career denouncing Kennedy, “it will be less than what he deserves.”
O’Donnell’s rant was in response to a heated exchange between Kennedy and Congresswoman Terri Sewell (@RepTerriSewell) of Alabama during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Sewell confronted Kennedy with his statement in a 2024 interview that Adderall and other drugs had rendered Black youths so unfit for society that “those kids are going to … go somewhere and get re-parented.” Sewell asked what Kennedy meant by that, and whether he had ever “reparented or parented” a Black child. Kennedy denied he ever said such things made the statements and accused Sewell of “just making stuff up.” Unfortunately for Kennedy, numerous broadcasters, including O’Donnell, aired the recording in which Kennedy suggested that Blacks were incapable of raising their own children.
When Ed Koch was mayor of New York, he and I customarily had lunch once or twice a year. During one such lunch, Koch suggested that a solution to the racial achievement gap might be to send children stuck in urban ghettos to more nurturing communities modeled on a kibbutz. I told him I thought the idea was both impractical and absurd, and pointed out that a country willing to invest in kibbutz-like havens for poor people or color would never have created racially isolated ghettos in the first place. As far-fetched as Koch’s suggestion was, I did not take it as attack on Black parents but as his attempt to think outside the box.
I have no idea what Kennedy was trying to suggest, as he seems incapable of consistent, coherent thought. Apparently, it never occurred to Kennedy that if Black people really were so awful at raising their own, millions of affluent white parents would not be hiring Black nannies to raise their precious children.
Obviously, not all Blacks parents are good at the job. Neither are all white or Asian parents. And the state has the power and responsibility to remove abused and neglected children from harmful environments. But the way to ensure children have a decent life is not by building re-parenting centers to take the place of Black parents; it is by helping parents acquire the resources and skills they need to do the job.
Yes, children of color do face special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious one is retaining their faith in themselves and in their society when confronted by gatekeepers like Kennedy who unfailingly see and condemn their threat and inadequacy but rarely foster or acknowledge their promise or potential.Re-parenting Black children.
When I’m in a mood for righteous indignation, I often turn to broadcaster @Lawrence O’Donnell, who serves up outrage about as well as anyone. Last week when I caught his “The Last Word” (@TheLastWord), O’Donnell was so indignant I feared he might work himself up to a heart attack.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. had left O’Donnell in such an apoplectic state that he mused that even if he spent the entire rest of his career denouncing Kennedy, “it will be less than what he deserves.”
O’Donnell’s rant was in response to a heated exchange between Kennedy and Congresswoman Terri Sewell (@RepTerriSewell) of Alabama during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Sewell confronted Kennedy with his statement in a 2024 interview that Adderall and other drugs had rendered Black youths so unfit for society that “those kids are going to … go somewhere and get re-parented.” Sewell asked what Kennedy meant by that, and whether he had ever “reparented or parented” a Black child. Kennedy denied he ever said such things made the statements and accused Sewell of “just making stuff up.” Unfortunately for Kennedy, numerous broadcasters, including O’Donnell, aired the recording in which Kennedy suggested that Blacks were incapable of raising their own children.
When Ed Koch was mayor of New York, he and I customarily had lunch once or twice a year. During one such lunch, Koch suggested that a solution to the racial achievement gap might be to send children stuck in urban ghettos to more nurturing communities modeled on a kibbutz. I told him I thought the idea was both impractical and absurd, and pointed out that a country willing to invest in kibbutz-like havens for poor people or color would never have created racially isolated ghettos in the first place. As far-fetched as Koch’s suggestion was, I did not take it as attack on Black parents but as his attempt to think outside the box.
I have no idea what Kennedy was trying to suggest, as he seems incapable of consistent, coherent thought. Apparently, it never occurred to Kennedy that if Black people really were so awful at raising their own, millions of affluent white parents would not be hiring Black nannies to raise their precious children.
Obviously, not all Blacks parents are good at the job. Neither are all white or Asian parents. And the state has the power and responsibility to remove abused and neglected children from harmful environments. But the way to ensure children have a decent life is not by building re-parenting centers to take the place of Black parents; it is by helping parents acquire the resources and skills they need to do the job.
Yes, children of color do face special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious one is retaining their faith in themselves and in their society when confronted by gatekeepers like Kennedy who unfailingly see and condemn their threat and inadequacy but rarely foster or acknowledge their promise or potential.

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Thoughts on President Dr. Jesus …
For those who find humor in the absurd, Donald Trump has become an essential and inexhaustible source of laughs. After launching a war that shut down the Strait of Hormuz, he declared the war’s mission was getting the strait open. He promised political liberation to the citizens of Iran and then threatened to wipe them from the face of the earth: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He answered Pope Leo’s pronouncement that civilization destruction was “unacceptable” by calling the Pope “weak on crime.” He then cast himself as the Pope’s spiritual superior with a post of a glowing-hands Doctor Jesus Trump blessing a bedbound man surrounded by awestruck acolytes with an American flag, a bald eagle, and floating commandoes in the background. A Peace Prize aspirant playing at being the God of War. A self-proclaimed healer compelled to polarize.
It all would be rip-roaringly hilarious if people were not dying, the world economy was not tanking, and something more reliable than “My own morality. My own mind” protected the world from the president’s power and petulance. We can only pray that Trump’s unpredictable threats, ultimatums and incomprehensible ravings do not eventually lead to a world-threatening conflagration fueled by presidential prerogative, patriotic frenzy and madness.
November will mark the 81st anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, the military tribunal convened by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States after World War II. In his opening statement, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Johnson, who served as chief U.S, prosecutor, declared, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Those proceedings, undertaken to hold the surviving Nazi leadership accountable, recognized that even war required rules, that the whims of political leaders could not be allowed to cancel basic human rights. The Nuremberg Charter was an antecedent to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which attempted to make clear that certain acts—including genocide and other crimes against humanity—could not be justified even by war.
Trump presumably would replace those international agreements with a consensus that the world would bow to his personal morality, which, as he put it, is “the only thing that can stop me.”
This summer, the United States will celebrate the 250thanniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which put the nation on the path to a constitution, ratified in 1788, that created a set of checks and balances of the sort that Trump disdains. Instead, his view is that the presidency should elevate one American above all others, with the right to persecute (and prosecute) his critics, enrich himself and his friends, and threaten pesky smaller nations with annihilation.
It’s sobering to realize that millions of Americans are coming of age in an era when their view of the American presidency will be shaped by a vain, cruel man who preens and pretends he is a god who respects no one other than himself and no law other than those with which he agrees.
In a few years, Trump will be out of office, and indeed, may even be dead—an event that many of his critics will treat the same way Trump treated former prosecutor Robert Mueller’s death. “Good. I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump declared.
But even death will not be the end of Trump. This country and the world will be coping with the consequences of redefining the role of the president for some time. What that means is that an aspiring democracy that once seemed on a promising path to equal opportunity, governmental compassion, and accountability will find itself in an agonizing battle for America’s soul, with no guarantee that decency and integrity ultimately will prevail.

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Why Texas’s governor won’t tell the truth about the Alamo: https://t.co/dURcBCFnhL

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Coverage of Ellis Cose lecture at UC Santa Barbara, Feb 2023: https://t.co/t8p4Yj7svT

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Why would a mother, who was also a slave. murder her own child?
https://t.co/aITIZv2ZpZ

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Ellis Cose at Miami Book Fair November 22 2022 https://t.co/Q9fr9sbrza via @YouTube

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

https://t.co/dntDec1pog
My interview this morning on @cspanwj

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

My interview this morning on @cspanwj
https://t.co/dntDec1XdO

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Review just published: https://t.co/UWB7adAAov

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

This is a historical piece I wrote on the ACLU, which just went up on their site.

https://t.co/cIfpD6NW6J

[Ellis Cose @EllisCose]

Free Speech. Really? https://t.co/hD9zdk6q7y via @BillMoyers