It’s no secret that all of us have to reach God in our own way. We can find God in a Christian way, discover Allah through Muslim ways or experience Oludumare via African ceremonial ways, for instance.
It is my humble opinion that this same approach is not only reasonable in religious recognition and worship, it also can be used in business, professional, personal and a variety of other situations when we are considering the “best” and “right” things to do.
In The Gantt Report opinion column, it is not unusual for me to question, and even criticize, the views of other media members.
I criticize them but I also respect them.
I don’t care what your job is or how you got hired or contracted the people that recruited you and hired you probably know more about you than you know about the place of your employment.
In my case, my friends, and some colleagues, are quick to suggest, “Lucius, why don’t you figure out a way to get your voice and your views heard on today’s top media platforms?”
Well, I’m happy and thankful as a journalist, lobbyist or political consultant to be where I am.
I don’t want to be Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, Craig Melvin or Don Lemon.
No disrespect, but I don’t want to be the Black journalist that reports what the white news directors want me to report. I don’t want to parrot the political views that news executive want me to parrot and I don’t want to take the side, whether liberal or conservative, that my employers want me to take.
I want to take the Godly side, the righteous side and the side I think is the truthful side whether my media comrades or media customers like it or not!
We as a people must understand that there are many roads that can be taken to reach a destination. We can take the high road or we can take the low road. We can get there by railway or we can get there by Trailways we just have to get where we need to be as a people any way we can!
Don’t go to sleep and dream that all people of color will ever want to go in the same direction or get to the same “promised land” at the same time.
But any idea that always demands that your way, or my way, is the only way, your understanding is the only correct understanding, your procedure is the only workable procedure or your solution is THE solution, that idea should be discarded, left alone or reevaluated!
I have no burning desire to be on network news shows, to write columns for white newspapers and magazines or to do journalism in the world’s largest media markets.
If you don’t know, been there, done that and I have the T-shirt, so to speak, and media credentials to prove that!
I’m comfortable, not necessarily in your mind but in my mind, with being one of the world’s most versatile, most provocative and most known unknown editorial columnists journalism history.
I would certainly like differing views on broadcast news shows and in the so-called major print media but those different views don’t have to be the views of Lucius Gantt.
The different view can be your view or the views of your children.
Black people in 2019 have the same media needs that Black people had when the very first Black newspaper came off of the printing presses before anyone reading this column was born…..Black people in America need to be wise enough and fearless enough to plead their own cause!
I will never celebrate the Black journalists that are happy to just have a job and are content to rubber stamp any news story that media “masters” tell them should be repeated!
Lucius is a contributing columnist to NNPA newspapers around the nation, and the author of “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” available on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere.