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CHANGING NARRATIVES
Never let anyone in the public eye make you forget the genesis of how they arrived at where they are. Celebrities & public figures alike are always trying to sell you a narrative. You must never fall for it. Allow me to give you 2 examples of this phenomenon.
Never let anyone in the public eye make you forget the genesis of how they arrived at where they are. Celebrities & public figures alike are always trying to sell you a narrative. You must never fall for it. Allow me to give you 2 examples of this phenomenon.
1st, sidebar. Install a screen recorder on your phone & computer. Don't just email links. Record the actual video b/c public figures often have the web scrubbed at random to remove the evidence of egregious prior statements & behavior. Now for the record, I leave up everything &
I do so 2 give the reader at complete history of the trajectory & genesis of how I ended up at a certain position. For example, Q. 370 Tb02h is the call number 4 my Ph.D. dissertation that is housed in the library at the Univ. of Illinois. I give this out freely for 2 reasons:
1) to smack down any claims that I am falsifying my academic credentials. Most human beings will attempt to delegitimize you personally when they can't defeat U on the battlefield of ideas. Don't engage such people. Put simply, I refuse to allow anyone to Dr. Umar Johnson me.
All my credentials are public knowledge & easily verifiable. My PhD dissertation can be looked up & checked out w/the info above. My law degree(JD) & MBA can literally be verified in our class' 2nd floor portrait in Houston Hall at Howard University School of Law right outside-
the Thurgood Marshall Moot Courtroom. My M.Div. Similarly, my M.Div. degree can be verified thru our class portrait right outside the library on the right side wall at Yale University's Divinity School. My M.Ed. & B.S. as well as all of my degrees & Level 7 Mathematics Teaching
License can be verified online at the Georgia Professional Standards Commission website, which contains license verification for every teacher every licensed in Georgia. Finally, my bar licenses can be independently verified thru the online directories of the Georgia State Bar,
& the Washington D.C. Bar & any of my federal bar licenses can be checked w/a simple phone call to any of the Georgia & DC Federal District Courts & the U.S. Supreme Court Bar as well. Again, I state all of this to head off at the pass some Negro or other person that might-
get upset at my remarks & attempt to delegitimize on my resume rather than competently & intellectually defeating the merit of my contentions. Now the second reason, 2) is to give you a genesis of my trajectory & how my views of the world have changed over the years.
For example, I wrote my doctoral dissertation almost 20 years ago & I disagree w/much of what I wrote then. Now it is important to note & most scholars won't admit this to you, but a dissertation is often the worst piece of scholarship an academic will ever write. Why?
Because it's your 1st major body of work. Think of like academic training wheels. You're just learning to write. A good scholar will argue w/his ideas constantly or as the Socratic contention that Dr. Cornel West likes to cite often, "the uninterrogated life is not worth living."
The greatest of scholars spend their lives examining & re-examining, arguing with themselves as well as arguing with the ideas of dead & living intellectuals. To that end, in recent years I have ripped the Dr. Hamilton of old a new asshole & thoroughly eviscerated-
his juvenile contentions about the world. I wrote a pro-affirmative action dissertation, which I utterly despise today. Why? I hv since become anti-affirmative action b/c my latter research showed that affirmative action only benefited the top 1% of blacks & of the few Negroes-
that were permitted thru white doors, few of them mafuckas reached back & did a damn thing for black folks at the bottom. They went through doors & up ladders & shut the door & pulled up the ladder behind them. The juvenile academic Dr. Hamilton did not comprehend that in his-
infantile scholar state. Thus, I have since repudiated my dissertation research as deficient & naïve. The young Dr. Hamilton didn't know what dafuck he was talking about b/c he was co-opted by academia & could not see the forest for the trees. It took leaving academia 2 see this.
This why I tell people all the time I may have attended an Ivy League institution, but I was never OF the Ivy League. Nor was I OF Howard or OF the Univ. of Illinois or GA State. My undergraduate alma mater Morris Brown College was closest in proximity to where I come from.
It should be noted that there is a reason why Morris Brown was the only black college in the Southeast founded BY BLACKS and FOR BLACKS. Their student body represented as much. At Morris Brown, I was in class with low income black students, former gang members, dope dealers,
strippers, churchfolk, Caribbeans, a few good white folk & a ton of other types of black students from all geographic regions of American. As admissions officers like to say, we had "a good salad mix" at Morris Brown. I only offer this as biographical info to give U insight-
to my trajectory. Nevertheless, no scholar is right all the time. A competent intellectual recognizes the impact of their trajectory on their research & the frailty of their past remarks & in the face of new evidence revises their position & puts forth a new conjecture.
Now, w/all this being said, I promised 2 examples of how public figures deceptively attempt to change narratives. Up 1st is Tamron Hall. I searched everywhere for this interview. I finally found the article on it but I could not find the actual video. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tamron-hall-black-journalist_n_7744662
This is why I mentioned earlier the need 2 install a screen recorder on your computer/phone b/c celebrities, TV personalities, & politicians will often scrub the web in an attempt to protect their image. In 2015, Tamron Hall uttered these words, "Every time a young girl comes in-
and asks me for advice, if you start your conversation w/ ‘how hard is it as a black woman’ or ‘how hard is it as a woman,’ I turn you around. We cannot look at the roadblocks and see the road at the same time.” Compare those remarks to the insinuated claims of racism when she
was fired by NBC & replaced with white former FOX host Megyn Kelly. Funny how all Negroes come to Jesus about White Supremacy when dey ass on the line. Nevertheless, I dare you to find the actual interview. Hence. Huffpost's disclaimer at the bottom of that article:
"The language in this story has been updated 2 more accurately reflect Halls remarks."Bullshit-she said it exactly how U wrote it & any attempt 2 change the narrative now b/c NBC fired herass 4 a white woman is hogwash. That is who Tamron Hall is & black America should never 4get
The 2nd example would be finding Obamas remarks 2 a reporter who asked him if he thought MLK would hv voted 4 him. I took copious notes of this interview but cant find the actual footage. Again, whenever U find that footage like this magically disappears, know that its by design-
Here is Obama's answer 2 that question: "No. DrKing would not hv voted 4 me. He would hv protested me & everything I do in this office." I remember it like it was yesterday. The white woman reporter looked stunned & dumfounded at his retort. I did a post on this interview at the-
time & I started that post w/"where are all the black preachers who claim 2 stand in the prophetic tradition of DrKing & who are protesting Pres. Obama 4 his weaponized drones campaign that has killed thousands of innocent civilians, especially Africans?" It was shortly after-
that Dr. Cornel West publicly called Obama "The George Zimmerman of the West" & "racial-profiler-in-chief" & shortly after that South Africans protested Obama being selected 2 speak at a conference in honor of Nelson Mandela after what they called Obamas drone "bombing of Africa"
Now I dare you to find that interview where the white woman reporter asked Obama the question about Dr.King. It has mysteriously vanished. Again, this is not by accident. This is why we are in need of black folk constantly keeping receipts so we never forget who people are.
Otherwise, we run the risk of falling for the melanin ruse & forgetting Lorraine Hansberry's ultimate retort that "all my skin folk ain't my kinfolk." Meanwhile, I will soon be finishing my open letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to rescind Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.
Stay tuned.
