More Bailey and Your Black Muslim Bakery
When all of this shakes out and thing settle down a bit more, I’ll write more extensively on my thoughts on the entire Yusuf Bey/Black Muslim phenomenon, but for now, I’ll bring you the latest news. Leslie Fulbright reports for the SF Chronicle.
The late Yusuf Bey’s son-in-law said Monday that he was the main news source for a series Chauncey Bailey was writing about Your Black Muslim Bakery and that he was stunned to learn the journalist may have been killed over it.
Saleem Bey, 43, said that he and Bailey were longtime acquaintances and that the two had decided a few weeks ago to collaborate for an exposé on the bakery’s decline since its founder, Yusuf Bey, died and his son Yusuf Bey IV took over.
More proof of the abject thugishness of this organization – they killed a journalist who had written a story that wasn’t being run exposing their illegal bankruptcy plan. The Bakery was a perfect combination of liberal guilt, political fecklessness and classic mau mauing. Hopefully this will serve as a wake up call that politicians, the media and people in general can’t turn a blind eye to any organization that’s a mixture of community revitalization, black entrepreneurship, organized crime, wacko religious cultism, antisemitism, covering up child rape and just general thugishness.
The thing is, everyone knew these people were abject thugs, and yet Oakland’s political and media establishment continued to ignore the evidence of their criminality and instead recognize child rapist Yusuf Bey as some sort of revered community figure. It’s distressing when nearly every conservative and neoliberal critique of post civil rights liberalism and black organization comes true in one horrible instance. This should be a wake up call to everyone who hadn’t gotten on the neoliberal/neoconservative critique of the welfare state bandwagon in the early 70s or early 90s, and all but the most politically deformed and reactionary should come around now.
