Black Free Speech is Different

The Gantt Report

By Lucius Gantt

I hope everyone went to the polls on election day and voted for the candidates they thought were best.

You already know how I feel about the results, in more than a few instances, Black candidates were used and manipulated to generate high Black turnouts and Black votes for non-Blacks on the ballot.

I’ll talk about the politics of the 2022 elections after vote totals are tallied.

Today, let’s talk about what the ‘hood is talking about.

More and more high-profile Black men and women are being chastised, criticized, released and terminated for things they have said.

News host Tiffany Cross was recently fired from MSNBC for making comments about politics and about news persons on other networks,

Ye, aka Kanye West, lost business relations with Adidas, Gap and others after so-called anti-Semitic comments and Kyrie Irving, lost his shoe deal with Nike and was suspended by the Brooklyn Nets for comments about Jews.

 Gantt Report readers promptly called me to tell me how wrong it was for Blacks to be victimized because all Americans have free speech because the right to speak freely is in the U.S. Constitution

I say slow your roll. Black “free speech” is not the same as white free speech!

African Americans have never had equal rights in the United States! The Constitution had to be amended to make it possible for Black people to vote. Laws had to be passed before Blacks could own property or even sit at a lunch counter or use public bathrooms.

Blacks in America can’t say what white people can say. White people can talk about Blacks, Black businesses and Black communities but you better be careful about what you say.

“Well, you do it Lucius. You even write about devils and beasts”, they tell me. Yes, I do but I never call individuals or specific elected officials “devils”. I say some politicians, news hosts, corporate executives and others do “devilish, animalistic, beastly or satanic” things.

OK, you can say I go hard in the paint. I’ll accept that but I go hard professionally. I know when to write or say, “I believe, I suspect or I think”, I just don’t do emotional, knee-jerk writing. I don’t write columns without doing necessary research to wrap my opinion columns in the cloak of truth and credibility. I don’t make “sheet” up! I don’t write for sensationalism. I don’t try to write columns that people might like. I write about the truth, and I don’t care if other journalists, or people, like my columns or not.

Years ago, The McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum was established in Chicago to highlight freedom in a national way. Five hundred or so quotes from Americans were displayed in the Freedom of Speech section of the museum.

Benjamin Franklin, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other famous people had their comments and thoughts displayed in the free speech section.

And, so did The Gantt Report. The columnists that you love were not even mentioned.

The TGR quote was about media members being embedded in U.S. military units in Iraq “acting” like journalists.

I will never be accused of being anti-Semitic. I have some dear friends that practice Judaism. I graduated from a predominately-Jewish high school in Atlanta. However, I won’t hesitate to tell the truth about religion or any worshiper.

This column is getting long so let me end by saying, I don’t know what the future holds for Tiffany Cross. You guys loved April Ryan for a few minutes, but now she’s like a media ghost- invisible

Don’t worry about Ye. He owns his brand, his designs, his music and so on. He can make and sell stuff, but he can’t be “Adidas”. Adidas could stick another pin in the Ye balloon by making shoes that look eerily similar to Yezzys, and they can sell them cheaper without having to pay Ye hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kyrie Irving can also be all right if he would stick to basketball and leave hate and defamation tweets alone.

So what, if Kyrie loses his NBA job? Kyrie can get a multi-million- dollar contract tomorrow to play pro basketball in China or in some other country.

If you don’t know, former NBA player Stephon Marbury is a basketball icon in China, where a statue of him recognizing his basketball prowess was erected in the communist country.

Finally, free speech is a so-called protected right for all Americans but again Black free speech is different from white free speech.

If you want to say what you want to, tell the truth and be able to generate your own money.

The first thing that will happen when powerful people get mad with you is your money stream will be targeted and attacked!