Is the idea that "confusion can become as instructive as precision," a classic oxymoron, defined as putting words together that contradict each other?

 

Just like "bittersweet," confusion and precision at first glance are words in conflict. But on closer inspection, they spawn an interesting bit of reality. For there was a time when confusion and myth, fanned by racism, gave rise to disunity – confusion many called it.

 

Whether we were born and nurtured in Jamaica, Panama, Nigeria, North Carolina or Michigan, for instance, Blacks were viewed through the lens of the accidents of their birthplaces. In the process, they often fall victim to the deliberate distortions in pictures painted by others. Little wonder that the things that bind them were downplayed: their rich cultural heritage and their Blackness.

 

That division spawned a void between reality and the figment of other people’s imagination. That happened because others of a different ethnic hue sought to speak for Blacks. It’s an everyday occurrence in the 21st century.

 

But that’s nothing new.

 

Nearly 200 years [ago], that unfortunate situation brought two men together.

 

John Russwurm, who was born in Port Antonio in Jamaica in 1799, but who became the second Black man in America to be awarded a college degree, and the Rev. Samuel Cornish, a Black American Presbyterian minister who was born in Sussex County in Delaware, linked arms and made a historic move. In 1827, the West Indian and the African American launched the first Black newspaper in the United States. It was called Freedom Journal and it made its appearance in Manhattan. The purpose was clear: "We wish to plead our case," Russwurm and Cornish wrote. "Too long have others spoken for us. Our vices and degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed unnoticed."

 

Although the paper had a relatively short life and the men went their separate ways, what they showed was that the confusion of a mislabeled identity can be transformed into the precision of a sense of self. They used the pages of the Freedom Journal as voice that began to equip people of color with a cultural armor that beat back what Dr. Cornel West, the scholar of Princeton University, calls the "demons of hopelessness and meaninglessness."

 

But they did something else. The initial 19th century thrust into publishing made Russwurm and Cornish the founding fathers of what we call the Black media. At its heights during the civil rights era of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Black media institutions from the Chicago Defender, the Michigan Chronicle, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier, to the hundreds of papers and radio stations that dotted the media landscape across the nation, were the vibrant voices of Black souls fighting for equality of opportunity, be it in education, housing, jobs, business, you name it.

 

Today, the publishers of the Carib News, Essence, Ebony, Jet, the Amsterdam News, Black Enterprise and other Black publications are standing on the shoulders of Russwurm and Cornish, the early pioneers, and are walking in their shoes, ever mindful that although the horrors of slavery that existed in 1827, the pain and suffering of Jim Crow laws of the 20th century, and the spectacle of urban riots of the 1960s have been replaced by a far different but insipid climate, clearly, the battle by Blacks is far from over and the need for a healthy Black media remains ever present.

 

Yes, the United States may have a Black President in the White House, New York a Black Governor in the Executive Mansion in Albany and some of our leading corporations and educational institutions are led by Blacks, something neither Russwurm nor Cornish could have foreseen. But another kind of attack is underway, one which seeks to reverse the progress made in the last 50 to 60 years. That’s because, much like in the 1820s, the principles of humanity, decency and religion were relegated to the sidelines by the practice of prejudice.

 

The decision by Karl and Faye Rodney back in the 1980s to launch the weekly Carib News underscored the need for a vehicle of expression opened to all shades of opinion, especially those held by people with Caribbean island-backgrounds. It wasn’t that they sought to put distance between Caribbean immigrants and native born Blacks. Not at all. That would have been destructive and counter-productive. Instead, they saw the importance of building bridges that led to greater opportunities – be they economic, social or political – while, at the same time, promoting the kind of understanding that ensured Blacks live together in harmony as good neighbors.

 

A guiding principle, which influences much of Black media institutions, was built on a foundation laid by Marcus Garvey and outlined in 1923. It was the recognition that "every person has a right to their own opinion; every race has a right to its own action, but no race of people should influence you to act against your own."

 

That’s why the columns of Carib News have remained open to diverse opinions and are supportive of those steps and programs which bind Blacks, not separate them as people from different Caribbean nations and territories and certainly not from African Americans. Little wonder then that Prof. Rex Nettleford, vice chancellor emeritus of the University of the West Indies, who died last week in Washington, described the paper, at the 2009 Caribbean Multi-National Business Conference in Jamaica in November, as the "most Caribbean of newspapers," in and out of the Caribbean and the United States, one that was required reading every week.

 

That brings us back to 1827 and the Freedom Journal.

 

"From the press and the pulpit, we suffered much by being incorrectly represented," was the way the paper put it back then. Unfortunately, though, it is still happening. Just last month, the Rev. Pat Robertson used his national television religious program as a pulpit to tell the world that the earthquake in Haiti occurred because the people of that country made a pact with the devil.

 

That monumental piece of ignorance and distortion brings to mind something else that Russwurm and Cornish said: "Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us dearly, though in the estimation of some, mere trifles."

 

No need to say anything more. The history lesson said it all.

---