I Don't Like Royson James

Someone I respect told me that Royson James of The Toronto Star is a really nice guy and I believe that he has a nice personality. In terms of what he writes, however, he is a misleader of our local community. This fellow is so biased that he tends to obscure the truth, willfully. Take his column today in which he tries to equate Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King.

King's rhetoric and mission strongly offended the people of his time, black and white. If YouTube were around in the 1960s it is a sure bet that King would have been branded, like Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, a hate monger.

It's true that King opposed the war in Vietnam and criticized American foreign policy. But that's not surprising; he was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, a pacifist. And, for the same reason, when it came to racial politics, he was an outstanding exponent of equality and harmony.

Jeremiah Wright, on the other hand (an ex-marine), is a demagogue who loves to draw a strong, hard line between "rich white people" and the humble members of his spiritual community (like Michelle Obama who went to Princeton and Harvard and earns over three hundred thousand dollars a year).

Here's one of his lines: "Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home, Barack was!" The implication is that Barack Obama was raised in urban squalor in a family that had been oppressed and abandoned by the surrounding society. But that isn't the case at all. He was raised, largely, by his middle-class white grandparents in multi-racial Hawaii. Obama's father did desert his family when he went to Harvard but his mother managed to marry again and get a PhD.

This statement, however, seems tame beside Wright's wilder claim that “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color” not to mention his firm knowledge that "The government lied about Pearl Harbor. They knew the Japanese were going to attack."

Like many people who claim to admire Martin Luther King, Royson James seems to have more faith in violence than King's principles and, indeed, he sees King's elevation to superstar status as a deliberate ploy to defang the real driving force of change.

America faced a choice: Change or burn. America changed.

Faced with Black Power and black rage, white America came to understand that radical Martin was preferable to Malcolm X...

To be honest, however, this isn't what irks me most. What really bugs me is when James applies the same faulty logic to the Toronto scene, over and over again. (More to come).

Comments

[Bjorn C.]

I know Royson James personaly. I don't hink this artilce is very nice and needs to be deleted!

[Recruiting Animal]

Dear Bjorn,

Thank you for your comment. However, I'm not sure if it is a joke because, to be honest, I don't understand your point.

You said that the article is not very nice.

However, I acknowledge immediately that Royson James is, personally, probably a fine fellow. Professionally, however,
he has an axe to grind on an important issue thatleads him to play with the truth to suit his own intent.

Analyze my article and tell me where I've gone wrong. Then I'll give you a few more of his masterpieces to work on.