a princess of now

...I think when I write essays I’m out to do on the page what we can’t do in the media. We don’t have billions of dollars that are available to these people who do what amounts to a propaganda attack on us. We’re being out propagandized. When I look at the newspapers, I’m furious. Because I can see where the interpretation of who we are and how people from the outside define us.

My friend Cecil Brown is very upset because the SF Chronicle is doing a Black History Month series and it’s all White male writers! I mean they assign Black History Month to all White writers with all these African American writers in the Bay Area and in California? I mean I’m here and I’ve written for them. And of course, they wrote about the kind of black image that appeals to them: Athletes and Entertainers. Not a single scientist, or inventor. I was down at Lockheed Martin, addressing the Black employees: Engineers and Scientists. I told them that a lot of the space equipment used by NASA was invented by Black scientists, yet when Mailer wrote that dumb book about the moonshot he said that Blacks were jealous of this White achievement.

The formula for sending a shuttle into space and bringing it back was devised by a Black woman scientist.