This is the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Nellie Bailey, along with my co-host Glen Ford. Coming up: James Baldwin had a very long career, but never wrote an entire book about Africa. However, a Black scholar says Baldwin’s later works show a keen understanding of African liberation. And, should a female athlete be disqualified from competition if some people think she looks and performs too much like a man?
But first – Dr.Jared Ball has spent years disproving the proposition that the road to progress lies in harnessing Black consumers’ “buying power,” which supposedly exceeds a trillion dollars a year. Dr. Ball is a professor of Communications at Morgan State University and author of “The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power.”
The great writer James Baldwin is mostly known for his insights on race in the United States. But, according to Dag-Mah-Wee Woub-shet, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Baldwin displayed a growing understanding of the African liberation movement in his later works. Professor Woub-shet wrote an article on the subject for the Journal of Contemporary African Art.
Sociology professor Ah-NEE-ma Ah-jeh-PONG, of Simmons University, specializes in exploring questions of gender and sports. Dr. Ah-jeh-PONG published an article, recently, that focused on the 2012 Olympic Games, where South African women’s track star Caster Seh-MEN-yah won a silver medal but caused a huge controversy by looking too “mannish.”