The American Race

Dear Katie: Keep The Fatih

On the primary coming down to the race drenched innuendo surrounding Barack Obama and his Rev. Wright problem, a friend wrote me the following, in some anguish:

Leon - this whole conversation is so gut-wrenching, and I don't know if I have enough faith in America to get through it without racism prevailing...

My friend-a colleague, really-was raised  in "a pretty religious Protestant home" and later converted to Judaism. I can understand how her faith has been shaken. I'm watching the coverage of primary night and I see the exit poll graphic:

"50% of voters said Rev. Wright was a factor in their vote."

But I also see what, apparently, Hillary Clinton would have us pretend not to see: Obama takes North Carolina by double digits, performing as expected; Hillary clings to a 4 point lead in an Indiana too close to call because the votes from heavily black Gary, deep in the Chicago media market, has not been counted...yet.

Katie, don't you weep!

Yes, Clinton seems to have leveraged racialized resentment/doubt/fear into 65% of the non-college educated white vote. Race, specifically the political privilege of what is deemed the white heartland, still matters in America.

But, for the first time in our history, it is no longer determinative.

And the night, like our history, is now still young, even less than an hour before midnight.

A Cocktail Before Tonight's N.C.-Indy Showdown

I just loved this from NYT's Tom Friedman today:

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Talk later.

Hillary And The Voters, God Bless Their Pointed Heads

Forgive my absence.

There is SOOOOO much I've been trying to find words to say for almost a month. I just got off the phone after talking on the public radio show "To The Point" with Warren Olney on the latest from Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

And boy, do I finally realize how backed up I am!

Gotta get cracking. Right now.

But first, an appetizer, something I set aside from the Daily Show last week (April 23).

It's Jon Stewart summarizing the entire trajectory of the Clinton campaign to date, how she went from presumptive liberal-centrist democratic nominee to the standard bearer for white blue-collar democracy, as made in (presumably smoke-free) super-delegate back rooms.

With political education this quick, easy and funny--and free for the price of basic cable--no one has an excuse for not knowing the time of day it is in America. Enjoy!

Getting Closer to Right on Rev. Wright

Big P.S. to yesterday's (March 25) post.

Turns out Daily Kos peeped the fact that Jeremiah Wright was merely quoting former US Ambassador to Iraq Edward Peck when he said "America's chickens had come home to roost," after 9-11.
All Kos had to do was look at a bit more of the so-called "incendiary, anti-white" Wright sermon in question.

It seemed to go without saying that much of the Rev. Wright controversy has been "manufactured" by certain media outlets for ratings. But Kos said it anyway because, I assume, a lot of folks still don't get it.

Check it out:

Looking For The Anti-White in Wright

I need a little help here. With the facts, M'am, just the facts, please.

I've transcribed the Jeremiah Wright clips in heavy U-Tube rotation, as originally sliced and diced to suit the taste of the viewers of Fox News.
For the life of me, however, I can't find the anti-white stuff.

As far as his opinions go, I heard a lot of anti-American GOVERNMENT speech. He makes "the government" out to be a great liar that is guilty of a number of sins:

1. nuking Japan without "batting an eye" in concern for the morality of breaking the Japanese will by incinerating a large civilian population.
2. lying about deliberately infecting black men with syphilis in the infamous Tuskeegee experiment.
3. fueling the prison-industrial complex while vigorously and selectively enforcing onerous anti-drug laws to fill them.
4. lying about the connection between Al Queda, Saddam Hussein, 9-11 and the threat of Iraqi WMD to justify invading Iraq.
5. (he also said the government would go so far as to plant WMD to validate attacking Iraq, much as the LAPD and other police departments have been known to plant real drugs or weapons as evidence on suspects of choice. As it turned out, according to the excellent Frontline documentary Bush's War, all 'the government had to do was bring some diagrams of fake evidence before the United Nations.)

Wright also said the government invented AIDS and  was  bringing drugs into the black community in a deliberate plot to destroy African- Americans. It's a belief that is shared in many segments of the black community. I have always thought such conspiracy thinking a bit much, however, and I defy Rev. Wright to prove it.

But I also defy his new found detractors at Fox et al to prove that this general view—that American governments have carried out genocidal plots against people of color— is anti-white. It's like calling Native Americans anti-white if they should dare bring up the Trail of Tears!

Now, Wright also said some harsh things about America in general. Most infamously he called on God to damn America for "killing innocent people," and for treating it's citizens—perhaps implicitly it's black citizens—as less than human. This is the clip that everyone who still thinks Barrack Obama can never distance himself enough from Wright has memorized.

But, as I once said on national television, America does not mean white, any more than 'American' means 'Caucasian'.  To damn America for it's sins (and if you think America is categorically above sin in it's history then we have NOTHING to talk about) is not the same as damning white people for being white, which would, of course, be racist on its face.

Yet, I suspect, when the sin is racism AND the one doing the damning is black—and yelling—the message is heard as anti-white, dangerously anti-white. I'm sure that's how it was heard right before and for a century after the Civil War, and responded to with a special violence. Today it's not so dangerous, but for some it comes off as anti-white all the more.

Note to Gerry Ferraro: Now that you're done pondering 'what if' Obama wasn't black, try pondering 'what if' Wright were white? For one thing, his view of that the current government's Iraq war policy is an utter fraud would be exactly the same as the producers of Bush's War and a great many recent works of important journalism. His take on the so called 'war on drugs' would not be dissimilar from mainstream white liberals like Sen. Edward Kennedy. I suspect his general view of the sins of corporate power and wealth ("...a country and a culture controlled by rich white people...") would not be far from Ralph Nader's.

And when Wright said America's wickedness (from Nagasaki to backing the Shah of Iran) had brought "chickens home to roost" on 9-11, he was no different than Jerry Fallwell in his view that the attack was God's judgment on America for allowing abortion and gay rights.

And when Wright satirized the Bush administration's national security leadership with"a paranoid group of patriots that, in the interest of homeland stupidity...I mean homeland security..." he did nothing that Jon Stewart doesn't try to do to Dick Cheney every other night on the Daily Show. Except Stewart seems to experience a lot more glee in doing it.

Like the truth about the Tuskeegee experiment, the lack of anti-white in Wright is a fact, but in the current environment, at least up until recently, the facts don't necessarily matter in the outcome of ordinary  political debates.

But, as we have seen, 2008 is a most extraordinary political year. And it's only March.

 

links for 2008-03-20

• Obama Hits the Mark in Race Speech - The Brody File: David Brody Blog - CBN News
• Frank Schaeffer: Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero - Politics on The Huffington Post

Shooting At The Messenger

Take a look at this extended post, the text of my remarks at a lefty Labor forum a few weeks ago. (On re-read they definitely pass the writer's regret smell test.)

About 15 minutes into the question and answer period, an older (i.e. noticeably older than my 54 years) woman seemed mad enough to rip me a new one for what she interpreted—perhaps rightly—as a pro-Obama slant to my analysis of the election dynamic to that date. The thing that stood out was her declaration that she just doesn't know who Barack Obama is, because, paraphrasing her words:  'he's not black, he's not a civil rights leader, he's not a Christian'.

Clearly she was a Hillary supporter, and that was because she did know who Hillary was, in 80's-90's identity politics terms: a moderate, post-feminist veteran of the moderately progressive DLC wing of the Democratic party. This woman did not appreciate being reminded how Obama was totally mucking up Hillary's entitlement to a Clinton-Democratic restoration by refusing—unlike Clinton—to wear his assigned mask.
I bet the following part of my remarks drove her nuts

Masks don’t seem to really suit Barack Obama

i. Either that or the one he wears is so very, very good as to be invisible, transparent and impenetrable, all at the same time.
ii. In the heat of the South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton, past master of the blackface mask, decided to wipe the cork off his face and apply it to Obama.
1.  But, lo and behold, Obama has apparently retained the gene that confers Teflon-like protection against forcible blackening up. Master Bill couldn’t make anything stick; it just kept blowing back on him.
a.    Yes, you MAY ask from which side Obama inherited that useful bit of DNA, but I will NOT go there right now.
iii. Obama’s maskless mask—a/k/a his American Skin— messes folks up because they can’t figure out who he is by looking at him:
1. It forces them to actually listen to him; and then, of course, it’s too late.
2. Without a mask he’s not black like anybody white people think they know, especially white people over 40.
3. He’s not black like black people think they know themselves, either. He’s not King or any of King’s latter day pall bearers. He’s not your stereotype Oreo-sellout, but he’s not Tavis Smiley either.
a.    But he is black the way we always hoped we might recognized, but really never expected to be in our lifetime
i.   Which is to say human and American, first and foremost. A black that’s much more than coincidence, but much less than a condition.
4. He’s not black like hip-hop is black…except to the very important extent that his biggest and most important constituency also happens to be Generation Y whites.

I spoke before Geraldine Ferraro declared Obama wouldn't be the leading contender over Hillary if he were not black. I spoke before Rev. Jeremiah Wright's passionate denunciations of America's sins got into heavy rotation across all media. But something in the woman's (who, for what it's worth appeared to be Hispanic) tone sounded prophetic, even as she proved my points:

 

Transcript: Obama's Race Speech

I'm shamelessly providing link to first transcript of Barack Obama's historic speech on race in Philadelphia today that I could find, because it's just that important.
NB: it was in the International Herald Tribune site, reminding us of just how INTENSELY the world is watching this particular conversation.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/18/america/18obamaspeech.php

Just Between Us (Feminist) Labor Lefties

No, I don't really qualify as a (F)LL. But 2 weeks ago I did address such a group, at the City University of New York's Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies. The forum, Race and Gender in the Change Election, gathered about 50 mostly left leaning labor movement veterans, most of them well over my "50-something" in age.I really wish I had blogged this some weeks ago.

I'll put my remarks in the extended part of this post. But the reason I had to get this out now is the speech Barack Obama is making on the subject of race as I type. I want to connect one fairly vehement reaction to my remarks by one woman to the eruption of the race and gender questions (and they are separate and distinct questions) in the two weeks since, and Obama's immediately stirring words.

Here's what I said: I gotta tune all the way into this historic speech!

Of All (American) People

Watching the victory, and opposite of victory speeches as the Wisconsin primary results roll in —and the post-vote bloviating begins —here's what struck me:

Barack Obama didn't just take Wisconsin from Hillary Clinton. He didn't just take the majority of so called "blue collar" voters, or very nearly half of women voters. In his lengthy yet still must hear speech, weaving increasingly specific policy promises with his now trademark discourse on audacious hope, Obama continued his slow, steady hijacking of archtypal American political identity.

Suddenly it's Obama embodying the American that was Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy. And then, without giving anyone a beat to think about it, he brought in Martin Luther King (who, after all, is also a federal holiday) and instantly lifted King to founding grandson status. And as he does it, he's retelling the American story, with a vividness that has been missing since....since forever.

And the funny thing, I believe, is that only an Obama can do it. Not even Bill Clinton can do what Obama is doing on the podium in Houston tonight. Hillary, as a white woman, talented as she is, really never had a chance.

The peculiarly American journey on race and cultural identity may have finally come full circle in the candidacy of Barack Obama. White men have always enjoyed the privilege of "putting on" Americans of any skin, class, ethnicity or gender at will, for good or ill. Whether for sincere tribute, parody, scorn or mere craven appropriation only white men had this freedom. The only limit, to a degree, was their skill. Think Davey Crockett (blood brother to the Indian). Think Jolson in blackface. Think Elvis. Think Clinton (Bill, not Hil) bitch-slapping Sistah Souljah.

Obama is still strongly advised against channeling Lyndon Johnson and throwing his balls around. But he's all over the Kennedy-Roosevelt persona, while still bringing more truth to the newly exalted black preacher archetype than Bill ever could.

And if Bill doesn't watch out, Obama may overtake Bill's "good ole' boy makes the Ivys but remembers where he came from" trope while Bill is still in the dressing room, blacking up.

Obama and Hispanics: The Post I've Dreaded

Here's one of the lede's I haven't been able to get out of my head:

For about a decade I've said this in almost every speaking opportunity and most media appearances on the subject of the unity of so called "people of color."

Whatever else one can say and may be true about the people we call Hispanic and Asian-Americans, people who have come from many very different countries with many different back stories, one thing is true: they didn't come here to become part of a racial minority group as African-Americans are a racial minority group. And they certainly didn't come here to make common cause with black aspirations to demolish the color line. They simply aspire to cross the line, quietly, and are doing so in great numbers, with great success.

They just called California for Hillary, on the basis of an overwhelming Latino support.

The black from everywhere is getting more white votes than the WASP from the suburban Midwest. But the former Chicago street organizer's resume is not resonating on the 'calles' of the barrios.

Why?

I didn't want to write this because I didn't want to believe conclusions (reached by reporting  some years ago) about the fundamental difference between people seen as descendants of slaves and Hispanics or Asians. I don't like it, because it flies in the face of what I want to believe is clear and self-evident—our equal creation by God—to all people in the same way.

But it's not. To be sure, the younger, the better educated, the more deeply acculturated an Hispanic  Democratic voter is, the more likely they are to pull the lever like the average (read white) American of their particular community and class. That means many voted for Obama, and almost as many for Hilary, based on where they fell on the 'experience' vs. 'hope' calculation. I can live with that.

But as those vectors—age, acculturation and education— go the other way, I believe a different  dynamic drives Hispanic Democrats to Clinton.  If you were born in Mexico, Central or South America you have no context in which to place the  true 'audacity' of Barack Obama's hope—for his own elevation as well as for America.

Oh great, now the Republican operative talking head on CNN is drooling about Hispanics breaking for the Republican in the general election if Obama is nominated. "Hispanics," he says, "have a problem with Barack Obama."
Great, just great.

Understand, The current brown presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia are most outstanding for their sharp digression from the central tendency toward the veneration of the European that has been the Latin American rule since the Conquistadors. I don't think the average brown Mexican immigrant of a certain age could fathom an 'indio' Barack Obama surging toward the presidency of Mexico with strong support of Mexican 'whites' and the overwhelming pride and passion of darker skinned masses.

So how can they imagine our Obama daring this, in 'white' America? Especially when half of American Hispanics count themselves as 'white'? And especially when many of them see themselves as newly one rung up the ladder over the average black they encounter, often with a good deal of friction as they climbed over. How could voting for a man who looks like the people you feel you outworked to get ahead be progress?

Looking at the CNN guy manipulate Los Angeles County on the big iPhone screen. Thinking about how even Maxine Waters wasn't crazy enough to go for Obama-not with the plurality of Latinos in her district. Even still, she knows that she's only bought herself a little time; a Latino celebrating at Hillary HQ tonight is taking aim at her seat.

I can't help but think the irony of Obama's audacious hope is entirely lost on someone with this perspective. When you hear Hispanics say 'he's not ready...America's not ready..." as I have heard several on the radio today, it's really tempting to give racism all the credit. But the blame—and the irony—really goes to accident of ships missing each other in the dark of night....no, the predawn of what should be the next America.

Obama is throwing up canvas and leaning into the wind and against the current of America's founding contradiction. The Hispanic core are steaming along from waters where that contradiction for the most part, is denied as a matter of national catechism.

And yet, it still ain't over. To really mash up Faulkner's epigram about the South and the past, the future is not present, it's not even the future yet.

Super Tuesday, Five Minutes to Midnight

Somebody tell me:

Is it that Obama unites blacks and whites?
Or is it that Hillary divides Hispanics and Asians from blacks and whites united?

(Maybe I'll calculate the inverse, for fairness sake, but I don't think it's necessary.)

Miscegenation's Moment

I was actually readying a substantial post on the matter of Hispanics and racial identity politics in the Obama vs. Clinton contest.

But I was distracted by the Appalachian twang of a woman on the radio that could remake "Coal Miners Daughter". From somewhere in Georgia, she was talking about sweating blood to help elect Barack Obama. Something in her voice reminded me of something I used to hear...no, something I used to feel...from an important slice of the audience at my speaking engagements for  my first book, "American Skin."

The book's thesis is that America's fundamentally miscegenated nature was finally taking over mainstream commercial popular culture, raising the prospect of a truly transracial American identity emerging in this century. After my talks, many people would find much to discuss and debate with me for hours. But whether loving or hating my thesis, corroborating or refuting my facts, the vast majority  were most energized by the idea of racial admixture as both a fact on the ground, and as America's destiny.

Not just the obvious suspects, the openly black-white, white-Asian and certain Hispanic mixes. I remember speaking in West Virginia, and having the palest white people (usually women) thanking me for recognizing a yearning to openly embrace the racial opposite, as has been the covert or inverted reality for generations. West Virginia has never had a large black population, but it's got to be up there on the percentage of 'blacks' who are half or one-quarter white.

It's far from a racial paradise (e.g. the horrific race hate crime against a black woman last fall). But blacks and whites have no choice but to rub up against each other (often,apparently, literally)  in the same schools, stores and streets in this very poor state. Even when they hold the most base, racist beliefs about the racial 'other', West Virginia is too poor and too small-town to deny the truth:

Poor and working folks, black or white, are all in the same boatin post-civil rights, global economy America: ending up in the same bed (watching the same football games and rap videos) sometimes is the least of their problems.

It's no accident that the senior Senator from West Virginia votes like the congressman from Harlem. Or that the eminent Dr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (CEO of All Things African American, Inc.) who was 'shocked, shocked' to discover that a substantial part of his DNA is from Northern Europe (and has long been married to a white woman) hails from West Virginia.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, brother classmate!

After S.C.-Like Teflon For Blackness

After skimming the blogs on race and politics this morning before the South Carolina polls closed, I voted for the following as best line:

As soon as there was a real black person standing in his way, Bill [Clinton] wiped the cork off his face and reminded the entire electorate that however bad the Clintons were or are, they were still at least white. They were still not "outsiders," no brown skin, no Arabic or Swahili names. They still at least belonged in the White House, where Obama had no business even thinking he was running, being a "kid" and a "roll of the dice" and all.

The whole post, at Too Sense : Race, Politics and Hip-hop, is also a useful gauge of the impassioned confusion that still reigns—and rains—in so many quarters as the historically aberrant campaign of Barack Obama versus the Clintons rolls on.

And now (10:15 pm est) that Obama has thumped Hilary in S.C., it's gonna be coming down really, really thick for the next nine days until Super Tuesday. My executive summary: don't believe anyone who talks as if they know what this means. Don't believe the New York Times headline declaring a "coalition of white support" in Obama's S.C. win. Don't believe this post at Afro-Netizen, holding up the alleged corpse of "post-racial America" just long enough to spit on the grave it still refuses to bed.

Don't believe anything Bill Bennett says on CNN, on GP. (That's 'general principles' for those of you who don't speak North Bronx).

You don't have to believe me, either, but believe these facts:

• Barack Obama goes into Super Tuesday tied two-up with Hilary in caucus/primaries and ahead in delegates.
• Whether it suits him strategically or not, whether he has solicited its support based on race pride or not, black America is mobilizing for Barack Obama.
• Even in the deep South, Obama remains as much a cause as a candidate among whites under a certain age.
• Woe be unto the Clinton's if they try anything like last two weeks again. Their black non-elected surrogates like Andrew Young and Bob Johnson are now officially toast, useless to them, if not to themselves.
• South Carolina magnifies and underlines the writing the Clinton's black elected official supporters have already seen on the wall. Yes, they will be with Hilary for as long as they can. But no, they will not be putting their necks on the railroad track of the Obama train by attacking him.

Is America past race? Hell no. Does America really want to get past race? Hell yes; the only question is how bad. Bad enough to go up against every ineffable inherited assumption about the inevitability of white supremacy? For under-40 white America, the answer, so far, is 'yes'.

Bad enough to turn on Bill and Hilary Clinton? That's what we're about to find out.

Don't believe the fervent chants "Race Doesn't Matter" rising from Obama headquarters in South Carolina tonight. Race still matters. But don't disbelieve the spirit in those chants that still refuses to hush: race need not matter for much longer, at least not the way it used to.

Yes, I was more than willing to take Toni Morrison's metaphorical confirmation of Bill Clinton as the first black president literally. Yet now I have to accept his recent conviction in the court of cultural politics: Bill adroitly removed the burnt cork from his face, and did everything he could to smear it on Barack Obama. It seemed, they said, to throw Obama off his game. It seemed, they said, to reveal him as "the angry black man."

There has never been a teflon for what the Clinton crew tried to stick on Obama. Until, perhaps, now.

There he is, not so much on CNN, but YouTube, before a roaring crowd of mostly black folks and those same young white people. When he toasted the "most diverse coalition in history" they spontaneously shouted back "Race doesn't matter." He doesn't look any blacker for his run-in with the Clinton surrogate army. Obama's challenge was never convincing white people to see him as white. It was to see him the as he sees himself, and  in the process a better reflection of themselves.

" I did not travel this state...and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina, I saw South Carolina."

Some call such a statement the height of denial. But, when Franklin Roosevelt came into every living room with "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" in the face of the Nazi war machine, America denied the reality of our position all the way to pre-eminent superpower.

When he drops phrases like "the categories that supposedly define us," the crowd goes nuts. He becomes a vessel for every yearning for validation as unique individuals beyond category. He becomes the repository for a vision of America that, like Brigadoon, only emerges from the mists when the politics of hope meets the politics of fear at a critical historical intersection, and somehow hope beats the light.

It ain't over yet. But God seems to be favoring Obama with an extended yellow light.

The Clintons: Black Enuf For Ya?

Sorry I can't recall the name of the pundit to credit for this (forgive me, it was well into the 100th hour of binging on post-New Hampshire bloviating). But props to the guy/gal who said to keep both eyes open for what South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn says next.

Well, Clyburn has spoken, in the New York Times,  and it doesn't sound so good for Hilary Clinton's shot at the critical, 40+percent of the South Carolina democratic primary voters who are black.

It's absolutely amazing how far and how fast the worm can twist and turn when it comes to race, identity and politics these days. Not six months ago, it was all about how Barack Obama wasn't really black, and had no favor with African-Americans versus the wife of the "first black president of the United States," Bill Clinton. In September (though only reported last week) former UN Ambassador Andrew Young was smirking about how Bill Clinton in his day (and we know he puts in some long days) had probably bedded more sisters than Obama.

Not that he needs it, but here's a real big reason to wipe that smirk off, Andy. Jim Clyburn said he's frustrated by recent Bill/Hil coments that, in essence: dreams like Martin Luther King's are nice, but don't count for much without a Lyndon Johnson to get them realized. Read: You're no King, Barack, and even if you were, you'd still need a white master power broker to get things done.

Once more the ironies are too thick to spoon:

• Clyburn is the foremost heir of what King wanted for the political empowerment of southern blacks; he is the MAN in South Carolina. If he moves from strategic neutrality to even winking in Obama's direction, South Carolina goes for Barack.
• Lyndon Johson's schizophrenic legacy to the Democratic Party (civil rights acts, yes, Vietnam, no) is a very strange plank for a boomer like Hilary to use against Obama. Talk about being stuck in the past!
• Young's career and authority to speak on this begins with being one of King's right hands; it may very well end here with his last, fatal gaffe. What the hell was he thinking??
• Measuring the Clintons' bond with black folks by counting Bill's black conquests is like saying Strom Thurmond was a friend of the black man because he secretly fathered a black daughter with one of his servants. That should go over really well with black folks in South Carolina, of all places

But the thing is this: Who's blacker;

• the white couple that openly practice (and in Bill's case master) black cultural tropes and are on personal hugging terms with the black political establishment at every level,

or

• the half-white, half-African guy who is beyond talking about having marched with people who marched with King and owes nothing to the black political old guard?

And the bigger thing is: Is the Obama phenomenon once more dragging us, kicking and screaming, beyond the question of black authenticity, period?

Obama messes folks up because he refuses (generally) to campaign in blackface mask. Yes, he does tend to sound a little more down home before black audiences. But he doesn't primarily present himself to us as a vessel for our racial complaint.
That's the mask traditional post-civil rights black pols generally wear, with pride. And it's the mask white pols —fake or sincere—put on when they seek black votes. No one ever wore it better than Bill Clinton, and thus Hilary by proxy.
But there's something about this moment that is peeling this mask from Hilary Clinton's face, right before our eyes.

Poor—and I mean it sincerely—Hilary.

Obama: All or None of The Above?

RACE UPENDED, CANDIDATES HEAD EAST

Was the above New York Times headline wryly ironic, clueless or a dead-on double entendre?

I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore when I heard the raspy sound of pundits scratching their heads:

Was it that Barack Obama was biracial, i.e. sui generis?

Or was he still "a black man in America" who triumphed nevertheless?

Question of the moment after his "historic" win in the Iowa Caucuses: has everything we thought we knew about race and politics been transformed or merely suspended, and how long will it last??

Check this Salon media watch piece "Bill Bennett Knows Black People" on the utter befuddlement of the media on the race angle.

Here's what I still maintain, now with more conviction (and the courage of one electoral confirmation):

• Obama is sweeping Generation-Y because his story galvanizes their sense of a transracial identity; this is their John F. Kennedy in 1960 moment.

• As far as he goes, we will have to live in an extended Rashomon moment in which large, seemingly overlapping segments of America variously see the following Barack Hussein Obama approaching the White House:
  • the first black
  • the first non-white
  • the first transcendent (i.e. beyond race)
• African-Americans are still even more challenged than white Americans to wrap their minds around the Obama movement (yes, that's what it is!)
  
  • how could a black man be in the middle of a movement without asking us?
  • how can Obama represent the essence of a united American people when I'm still stuck representing the essence of being an American racial minority?

Finally, there's the matter of the Bradley Effect. It holds that a significant number of whites will tell pollsters they support a black candidate because they're unable to admit that they just can't. In the privacy of the polling booth, they vote for the white guy/gal, making polling unreliable in such a race.

Now, in Iowa, Democratic caucusers had no such privacy. They actually had to walk across a room and join other whites standing up for Obama. My question is: which is more sincere, telling a pollster what they might want to hear one-on-one, or bonding with a whole group of your own kind?

And what, if any, impact will that have on (overwhelmingly white) New Hampshire voters, who will vote in private?

I don't think I have to implore you: stay tuned!

Imus:Deja Vu All Over Again

Imagine another drum roll: the second  American Race podcast c'est arrive' !

This one catches up to the return of Don Imus to the national air, this time from the venerable studios of WABC-NY.

Last week—that would be the first week of December, 2007, Don Imus returned to the national airwaves, after his very public flogging and firing for what can only be described as racist bad taste.

His exile lasted all of a little less than 8 months. His first day back was the same day the Rutgers Scarlet Knights womens basketball team he insulted played their first home game, about a 40 minute drive from the New York studio Imus now calls home.

The Rutgers women—national heroines for the poise with which they responded after the attack last March—were already off to a 5 and 0 start on the 2007-2008 season, including a come from behind opening victory over the Chinese Women’s national team.

Imagine…they started off beating the best of China’s 600-something million women… but Imus caught back up to them just four games later. I know they forgave him, but I still feel bad…

And so it begins.

Click here to download Imus-Deja Vu All Over Again

links for 2007-11-15

• Obama in Orbit - New York Times
  Another columnist sees our future in Obama's face
  (tags: African+American Barack+Obama 2008+presidential+race identity linkrollthis)
• Andrew Sullivan Embraces Obama
  Sober conclusion: Only Obama is on right side of history now
  (tags: 2008+presidential+race African+American identity Republicans Barack+Obama Democrats)

Dreaming Anew About Obama

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world.

 —NYT columnist Roger Cohen, 12.15.07

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

—Andrew Sullivan, December cover story, The Atlantic

With two more MSM heavyweights weighing in on the "Obama is the future" tip (in very short order after this recent NYT magazine piece)  it's time to inaugurate a new sidebar update item.

I'm calling it Only Obama.

Sullivan's piece is especially interesting, and not just because he's a Republican conservative who initially supported the Iraq war. Sullivan goes further than anyone I've read in distilling generational healing from Obama's  not-boomerness. Only Obama carries no baggage from the  intraboomer culture war rooted in and symbolized by Vietnam, Sullivan says. But the maverick gay conservative also comes back to the plain matter of Obama's face.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy... The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

 

NB- I'm not necessarily an open Obama supporter. I honestly don't know who I'll vote for when the Democratic primary gets to New York. I don't even know if it will matter by then. But I am convinced that we have still not seen the full meaning of the Obama candidacy, whether he gets the nomination, or the presidency, or he does not.

So let's keep watching, and talking about it.

Black Is Not One Race.... duhhhhh

Sorry, but I'm compelled to get a quick hit in on the story I've been waiting for the tweezers of journalism and sociology to finally grasp:

Black is not a race. Specifically, we have been wrong to maintain the idea of a discrete, unitary black race. Black or African-American is really an ethnic group, at best. The first nail in the coffin of the "one drop rule" that creates us as a race has just been driven.

So, check out the hefty coverage of the groundbreaking Pew/NPR poll discovering a sea change in black perceptions. And really listen to what the leading--really the only--black political analyst at NPR, Juan Williams, is saying about this.

Check the Pew poll itself here.

This is big stuff. It comes as the annual study contrasting black vs. white television viewing preferences (a study I used to write about every year for over a decade) finds so much conversion of tastes as to declare in the headline "One Big American TV Audience" It comes as the New York Times discovers that "black skater youth" is not an oxymoron. Check out the discussion in Bold As Love.

I'm really packing it in here, because I'm still vain enough to want to be one of the first to dig into the standout stat: 37% of African Americans polled say blacks are not one race anymore.

It is one thing when "US" more affluent and/or well-educated, over 40 blacks (like me) complain—often bitterly and ALWAYS  in private and among ourselves—about the problem of "THEM" —the younger, poorer, less educated, hip-hop steeped black America— who don't share our values (or appear to have no values) but, unfortunately, share our skin color.

But it's quite another thing when a poll discovers that the 18-29 age group is even MORE likely  (44%) to say they're not in the same race as us  older folks. As  Juan Williams points out this morning, the fight to free a unified black race has been a token of fatih for many, many black generations, especially the boomers who wanted to believe that deliverance had come to pass after the Civil Rights movement. Even as we moved to the suburbs and otherwise penetrated the mainstream by the 80's we always maintained the thin fiction of racial solidarity with those left behind in the projects that produced the rap/hip-hop culture that now claims hegemony over what it means to be black.

But when so many in that very younger hip-hop cohort seem ready to sue for separation, it's a watershed moment. Why? Imagine the moment when American Jews stopped being a "race," like the Irish-Americans before them. When all the Jews fortunate enough to find themselves in Scarsdale were comfortable believing they had more in common with the goyim neighbors than their distant cousins still living in the South Bronx or the Lower East Side. How the Irish became white isn't just historical fact, it's  literally a book title. So is the story of how Jews became white folks, and what it says about race in America.

Yes, the Irish and the Jews were Caucasians, and the color-line was firm and all encompassing as the Great Wall of China then. But that was then. The color line just ain't what it used to be. Already, it no longer confines people of clear African decent who happen to also be Hispanic to the so-called black race. It no longer confines Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter, though in theory they are no less black than I am. It only nominally confines Barak Obama.

Yes, the door to opt out of an Irish or Jewish race was open much wider, and eventually taken off the hinges (which is why the self-identified American Jewish population continues to dwindle toward statistical insignificance). But the door to a new perception of black racial identity has long been open wide enough to escape for those who wanted to.

Many have literally done it by passing for white in broad daylight. But a great many more have been doing it in the dark of the privacy of their own homes and families for a very long time. Especially here in New York, where you don't have to look very hard to see Caribbean and African from Africa Americans consciously distinguishing themselves from black Americans.

There won't be a book "How The Blacks Became White." But there will be a work of history called "The End of the Black American Race." The first hot draft is all over NPR today, and many other media outlets near you. It should be in the New York Times, but their Pew poll story, borrowed from the AP, missed the lede, in my not so humble opinion.

Why We Watch Obama

“If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power...”
                                                                        —Barack Obama, beginning to wax profound

So began a recent, characteristically thoughtful and uncharacteristically game changing NYT magazine piece by James Traub. It's about Obama's unique take on the future of American foreign policy. But what strikes me for this blog is the piece—after so many months of the usual B.S. horse race coverage— finally fingers what makes Obama so compelling for so many more folks than those who are dying to see the first black president.

The headline, and this "so what" paragraph from near the top of the piece says it all:

Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?

He presents himself in all his cultural hybridity — African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.

The piece then goes on with reporting the (mostly admiring) observations of foreign policy experts on what Obama's foreign policy mind brings to the table. But the subtext, what Obama's being, maybe his soul, brings to the table—symbolized in his skin—is never buried.

Obama tells Traub that when:

“...you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.”

Skillfully, Traub lets the Times reader (read educated, liberal but still not fully in-touch with their feelings of attraction) take a long, almost loving gaze on Obama as he relaxes in a comfortable chair on his jet and tries to catch a nap. What keeps him from dropping off is the nub of the story: it's one thing to stand for reforming our relationship to with a world that is not on average as white and/or Christian as we are. It's quite another thing to actually be not as white or as Christian or as Western as the American average.

Thus Hilary Clinton still has an almost commanding lead over Obama on the foreign policy/national security issues.Neither Hilary nor John Edwards, while pressing essentially the same critique of the war in Iraq and the need use more respect and humility and less military preemption in our foreign policy, is confronted by the "experience" question that still dog's Obama. All have no more foreign policy experience than you get being a Senator. None have ever been president, though Hilary (presumably) slept with one in the White House for eight years. Obama doesn't come close to calling it the liberal racism that it is.

But read, please, between these lines:

“Hillary gets a unique pass on this issue,” he went on, “not by virtue of her service in the Senate but by virtue of the idea that through osmosis she gets it from Bill. And they’ve been actively pushing that story.”

Obama finally leaned back to nap, and I went across the aisle. I was telling (Obama communications director Robert) Gibbs my theory that Americans might be looking for a president whose protection they can huddle under when Obama opened an eye. And as he resumed the conversation, the frustration of months of pedaling hard and getting nowhere began to show. He wanted to know what kind of experience Clinton supposedly had that he didn’t, and what kind of crisis she was supposedly better suited to than he, and why “toughness” had become a stand-in for experience, and how Clinton could get credit for it when she failed to stand up to Bush on the Iraq vote. We batted all this around. Finally he said, “Ask Nye why Hillary’s paint-by-the-numbers foreign policy makes her more qualified to handle a crisis when for most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn’t, not by failing to use force.” I promised that I would.

And how did Harvard professor Joseph Nye, whose book about the Bush folks critical failure to use "soft power" should make him an Obama supporter (but he's not) answer?

“By osmosis of going through this,” Nye said, though he conceded that he wasn’t sure tacit knowledge could in fact be acquired osmotically. And he added that he had great respect for Obama. “It is,” he said, “a 51-49 type of distinction.”

"Great respect." I don't think Nye meant it this way, but I can't help hearing echoes of Sen. Joe Biden's gaffe about how Obama was "so articulate" in that remark.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will be able to focus America's still vague yearning to embrace the greater truth engraved in Obama's American Skin.  I've been humbled, to say the least, by how many of my pronouncements about the meaning of the browning of American popular culture over the last 20 years have turned out wrong. It's a subject I'll be taking up in posts to come.

But, humbly, I still think I was right about one thing: A sizable part of this country is trying to find a way to believe that Barack Obama's story is their own. So far, though, the fear factor is up, even if it's only 51 to 49.

Jindal and the Dream

Enough trying to find the perfect point in which (on which?) to reenter the swift yet stagnant river of the race conversation. Let me just jump in.

• Louisiana Governor-elect Piyush Jindal, "Bobby" to himself and anyone who chooses to see him as such, is not white, but he is Caucasian. See a summary of U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) if you don't believe me.

<Bobby Jindal and a supporter.Photo speaks for itself, but what does it say?

Jindal, of course, sidesteps the problematic matter of whether many of the people native to the subcontinent of India, as well as modern day Iran, Pakistan and the other 'Stans', deemed Caucasian by 19th century racial science, should have a claim to being white in America. Jindal, a Republican, reportedly says race doesn't matter.

It is, however, a matter of some dispute on at least one Asian-American site.

My favorite quotes:

Indians are more successful than any community in US, we don't give a jack about [race-based, affirmative-action] concessions....unfortunately indians look down up asians just as they look down upon black. So, there is no way indians would associate with asians, atleast for now... Do u really think an indian gives a damn what a black or asian is thinking of them. Who the hell cares!

The ranter is right; unless your racial category is a substantial impediment to your aspirations, or the impact of racial category offends you, why the hell would you care?

Jindal may not be white, but his decisive election  in a state like Louisiana proves that being Caucasian counts for something. If nothing else, it counts for not being black, which is still the biggest deal, especially in the Deep South. Dixie needs every well-trained brain that isn't committed to leveling the black-white playing field it can get its hands on. That's Jindal today, and the children of the low-wage Mexicans, who flooded in to rebuild after Katrina, tomorrow. They are slowly but surely being accorded the privilege of being defined by ethnicity, not by race. A privilege America has always, albeit grudgingly, been willing to extend to all comers —except African Americans.

All this leaves me in that part of the river where demands for racial authenticity, political correctness and a great deal of denial on ALL sides merge in a turbid whirlpool that, well...sucks...us downward and away from the light of the truth of our common humanity. We can't get there by denying what race has meant for hundreds of years up to yesterday. And we can't get there be letting it continue to have meaning, indefinitely, either.

The Bottom Line:

Good for Jindal, the Republicans and (proabably a silent majority of) Indian-Americans who care more about pride in their ethnicity than where they fit in on America's screwed up racial charts.

Stupid for anyone, especially the news media, attaching racial progress significance to this event. So many headlines about "First Non-White Governor Since Reconstruction," and so little thought to the fact that "since Reconstruction" means "since African-Americans were able to freely exercise their right under the Constitution to hold power."

Bad for anyone hoping for a turnaround of Louisiana's sordid traditions of racial injustice against African-Americans, as lately exemplified by the prosecution and ongoing persecution of the Jena Six. In the amazing politics of race, the Louisiana status quo can't be held as racist, because they just elected a "non-white" governor. The problem can't be with the system; it must be with the Jena Six and their supporters.

And bad for a real discussion of racial reconciliation.
'Cause, like the man said, even if race mattered to him, this wasn't about race.

Later Last Summer

The thermometer was still topping 80 degrees last week, so forgive my extra-long summer vacation.

Full disclosure: I've been flushed out in preparation for taping a segment on NPR (WNYC-NY) talk show host Brian Lehrer's cable TV show this afternoon. We're supposed to discuss what I talk about—race, politics, identity and culture—and the medium in which I'm talking right now.

Cutting to the chase, after a whole morning of catching up to what I've missed in this corner of the blogoverse, one post at Friends of Justice, itself linking to a recent New Republic article, said everything that might need to be said in a fleeting 20 minute television segment.

The post: Jesse, Al and the Mainstream Media

The TNR piece: Who Keeps Sharpton and Jackson Powerful? The White Media

What all do they say?

• the race/black black blogosphere has the same issues with traditional/mainstream media that the rest of new media has, only they're much more politically personal
• the black and non-black bloggers on our topics have an uneasy, sometimes suspicious co-existence in this corner of cyberspace.
• the Jena Six story is still the biggest thing to come out of the race/black system  of the blogoverse so far. Meaning, unfortunately, there's more than a little investment in claiming ownership for it's impact, and the right to define leadership.

It used to be that just showing up was winning half the battle. Lately, it seems like the Rev's Sharpton and Jackson only lose by showing up. It doesn't seem fair, but maybe they've had it coming. Blame this too on our little system of blogs and websites that have so broadened a political conversation that, as the TNR piece correctly points out, the mainstream media allowed Sharpton, Jackson and other 'annointed' civil rights leaders to dominate.

Ok, gotta get my shave on for another fleeting brush with fame....

Beyond the "Hot Ghetto" Mess

Time to lift our eyes beyond the "Hot Ghetto Mess" horizon, and get some bearings.
A post on BlackInformant.com about a new movie whose opening  (apparently deservedly) flew under the radar last weekend, got me thinking: who's the enemy, and what's the objective. It begins:

From the commercials, it looked like Soul Plane 2. I kept saying to myself during Hot Ghetto Mess “Man, it looks like folks picked the wrong thing to protest against. Anyway,here is blacktalentnews.com’s take on the movie “Who’s Your Caddy?”

The link to the blacktalentnews.com piece is well worth following. Beyond the review it has a quick Q&A with Tracey Edmonds, whose Our Stories Films produced the movie that is so "full of crass racial stereotypes including crude, lewd and wantonly irresponsible black characters, fart jokes, midget jokes and never-ending slapstick humor, [that] if this demeaning movie had been made by mainstream Hollywood, it would be courting charges of racism," according to blacktalentnews.com. There was also, reportedly, enough misogyny to merit scrutiny from WhatAboutOurDaughters, who led the Hot Ghetto Mess charge.

A representative review, from Guidelive.com, is here.

"Who's Your Caddy" is the first, strange (but not entirely unpredictable) fruit of Our Stories, a partnership between B.E.T. founder Robert Johnson and the Weinsteins (founders of Miramax). I'll resist all jokes about the unholy alliance between some of the (admittedly) more ruthless players in late 20th century media. Let's just say that with the billions he made building B.E.T. with ideas like Hot Ghetto Mess and then selling it to Viacom, Johnson is proving to be a gift that just keeps on giving to America, in the name of black America.

The good news: almost nobody went to see it. But the bad news is that they could have, in droves, if the timing was right, and it had been marketed better. And, other than wag fingers of "shame on you" there's not a thing we have much right to do about it. Not quite the same as going after advertisers on an objectionable TV show.

Though he may deserve it, Bob Johnson is not the enemy. If he wants to throw his money (and some of the Weinstein's) away like this, fine. And if he get's it right, with another 'wrong' movie next time, God bless him; this is P.T. (never give a sucker a break) Barnum's America. No, the enemy, as the cartoon Pogo said, is us. All of us, from the suburbs to the hood and everything in between.  It's the hardness of our hearts to our own pain when we see it inflicted on our brothers and especially on our sisters, and yet don't feel it ourselves.

So it seems to me that the objective is to duplicate the feat of the Rutgers women's basketball team (remember them?). We have to do more to identify the victims of the "Whose Your Caddie?" entertainment to come. We have to make this kind of literature unfunny, unsexy and unhip. Ultimately, we have to create a market that redefines funny, sexy and hip in a way that's also affirming of black humanity and a positive relationship with each other and society as a whole.

It's not about changing Bob Johnson (or anyone else's) profit motive. It's all about challenging our consumption motives.

Meet "Reconciliation Blues"

A lovely post on Ed Gilbreath's Reconciliation Blues reminds me why his excellent blog must roll in the list on your left. (Meet his About page, and his passion to reconcile the races in Christ)

Ed says to give Barry Bonds a break as he approaches breaking Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, and whatever judgments—legal, historical and moral— awaits him afterward. Doping, of course is wrong, even though everyone, it seems, from Mark McGuire in his record breaking  '98 season to every other rider in this year's Tour de France, has been doing it.When the same scandal stalking Bonds caught up with McGuire in 2005, the burden of the red-headed sluggers presumed but unproven guilt brought him to the verge of tears on national television.

But, of course, no one thinks McGuire is a discredit to his race. What I like about Gilbreath is how his careful prose peels back the obvious layers of the racial onion to get to a deeper truth. He points out this hilarious Chris Rock clip on Letterman's couch and its point:if Bond's feat deserves a little asterisk because of steroids, what does the record of almost every white baseball god (most of them my beloved Yankees) deserve because their records were set with NO black competition?

"What's the bigger unfair advantage," says Rock,"a little pill...or racism?"

But, in Leave Barry Bonds Alone? my man Ed goes deeper. Because a Chicago columnist forced him to consider that the legendary deeds of Negro league icons like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and 'Cool Papa' Bell  were also incomplete without white competition.

(BTB-womanizing, drinking, gambling and much worse were not unknown among the Negro League players either.)

Think about it: it all comes together in Ty Cobb, an incredibly dirty AND racist player who (until finally outed in the film Field of Dreams) long epitomized the best tradition of fierce competition in sport.

What did we loose, as a country, for not having the collision between John Henry Lloyd covering 2nd and Ty Cobb—spikes flying—trying to break up a double-play in 1915? That year Cobb set the 'white' stolen base record that would not be broken until 1962, 14 years after black men like Maury Wills were allowed to take the same field. It was also just before black men would take the European fields of combat in WWI, and return with a new thirst for dignity and justice in America. What did we miss not having those confrontations also play out on the diamonds of the national pastime?

I agree with Ed. Leave Bonds and Michael Vick and the next brother who, in an age of media scrutiny that Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth could never comprehend, much less face, reveals the ugly truth: the only difference between sports stars and the rest of us is they have way more resources to accomplish the best and especially the worst our human nature holds.

Only the white ones never have to represent their race.

Our Mr. Brooks: Integration Is Dead (Again)

In his own words, New York Times house right-con David Brooks' recent column The End of Integration comes down to this:

The progress in civil rights has not produced racial integration...five decades after Brown, blacks and whites do not live side by side, even when they share the same income levels. They do not go to the same schools. And when they do go to the same schools, they do not lead shared lives...many educators are giving up on the dream of integration so they can focus on quality.
...it could be the dream of integration itself is the problem... It could be that it was... a nice dream, but not fit for the way people really are.

It never ceases to amaze how discussions of race and reconciliation, of social and economic justice, always come dow