Tom Jones is Black?

            I spent a big chunk of Friday reading and finishing “Live From The Afrikan Resistance!” by El Jones. I really don’t find her to be a very good poet. In fact I think she’s the worst poet we’ve had on the extensive reading list that I’ve read so far, and there are only six more to read. Additionally I think Jones is a bit of a loon. She implied in one poem that Shakespeare was Black. She doesn’t go so far though as to claim, as some nuts do, that Shakespeare was a Black woman. I found a YouTube video of some guys in the States called “The Black Israelites” who claim that not only was Shakespeare Black, but so were Beethoven, Mozart and all of the Vikings. They show an old drawing of some Vikings in a Viking boat and their faces are sort of grey. A drawing is not a photograph. DNA testing of populations in Scandinavia clearly shows who descended from Vikings. Oh, and they also said Tom Jones is Black. What else is new, pussycat?

            Jones made a lot of claims and I fact checked them all, finding that some that seemed like they might have been conspiracies actually turned out to be true. Like the CIA involvement in spreading crack cocaine in Black communities in Los Angeles. This seems like it was not a direct, planned involvement but they were aware of it being a direct result of their actions. This was in the 80s when the CIA was running guns down to Guatemala to aid the Contra rebels. The return trips carried cocaine, which was sold in LA for money to buy more guns and on it went until there were half a million Black people in jail that had been busted for possession of small amounts of crack.

            Another one was a study of syphilis in Black people in a town in Alabama. The study started before penicillin was discovered but even after the cure was found they continued the study without treating the subjects because they wanted to find out how syphilis affected people all the way till their death. Yeesh!

            On a more positive note, it turns out that long before there was a National Hockey League there was in Nova Scotia a “Coloured Hockey League” that contributed a lot to the way hockey is played today.