It's been difficult to watch fetal rights trump women's rights in the abortion debate.  Back in the day, there were chants of "my body, my choice."  Now, we argue at which month the fetus has the right to destroy a woman's health, sanity, family, and even her life, thereby accepting the right-wing frame that the fetus is an entity somehow divorced from and equal to the woman who carries it.

Bill O'Reilly preened when asking Joan Walsh if late term fetuses deserve any form of legal protection.  He preened because he dared her to provide the rational answer in this age of faux sentiment and thoughtless self-righteousness--be they of the Oprah or O'Reilly schools.

It's time to call the bluff and take back this debate.  The answer is a resounding "NO." 

Women deserve legal protection, and as long as a fetus is part of a woman's body, it has protections through her.  No outside person has the right to harm the fetus any more than he/she has the right to harm the woman.  No entity has the right to deny her the fruits of what's inside her body any more than they have the right to deny her the use of her liver.  What O'Reilly and his ilk want is to protect the fetus from the woman who carries it, when in fact, the woman is the only qualified arbiter of what is best for her and her body in the context of life and loved ones in which they exist.

I utterly reject the argument that fetus' are especial because they will be born and thus transform into infants.  I will not argue about a fetus' future state.  Its current nature as a fetus means that it lives inside the body of an existing human being.  That independent living being's needs and trump those of what lives inside its body and the disposition of what lives inside its body is in that being's sole discretion.   Period.  

The argument that fetuses may live to become infants and therefore deserve protection is also ad absurdum.  A cell can be cloned and can grow into an infant.  Should the pulling out of hair be outlawed?   As science matures, artificial means of keeping cells and cell groups alive will doubtless evolve.  What amount to petrie dish blobs will be "viable" outside the womb--with enough help.  This is the ultimate argument of anti-abortion crusaders.  They desperately want to outlaw abortion and even contraception.  To to them, a la Monty Python, "every sperm is sacred."  A woman is simply the subservient, relatively insignificant vessel for something more valuable than she--a fetus.   It's rights trump hers.

Barack Obama said that he rejected the pro-choice argument that there was no societal moral question involved in abortion.  He was right on the substance; he was wrong on the particulars.  It is grossly immoral for a society to so devalue a segment of its population that it reserves the right to force them under law to use their own bodies in ways that are harmful to themselves. 

The abortion debate needs to be brought home to the rights of women--not the rights of fetuses.  Let's face it:  To the anti-abortion crowd, it has been all along.  They have simply couched it in the cuddly swaddling clothes of romantic infancy to win the point:  "Who do you want to protect," they ask?  "this sweet, cooing child, or this selfish bitch who refuses to do what my God says is her biological duty?"

As long as a fetus remains a fetus, it gains the same rights and protections as the woman who carries it.  The fate of what exists inside a woman's body... that is hers alone to decide.  You may think abortion is wrong.  I think it's wrong to raise your child as a Nazi.  What harm can a woman who has an abortion do you?  At best it harms your delicate sensibilities in the abstract.  A child raised as a neo-Nazi will grow up with the will and perhaps the means to do a great many people a lot of physical and emotional harm.  If I don't have the right to stop people from raising their children as they see fit--regardless of the potentially negative impact on my life and wellbeing--you don't have the right to stop a woman from doing what she thinks best for her life and loved ones, especially since the only possible damage is to your delicate sensibilities.  We're both offended.  On both counts: Tough shit.  Man up.  It's none of your fucking business.

The woman's rights/pro-choice crowd needs to stop accepting the right-wing frame for this debate.  When asked if fetuses deserve rights, the answer is: Women deserve rights--including protection from people who would force them to use their bodies in ways they know to be harmful to their wellbeing, their loved ones, and their lives. 

Martin Luther King was a great man who led one of the defining movements of the 20th century--for America, and by example, for the world.  However, I believe he was fundamentally wrong in the conclusions to which his Christian moralist background led him throughout most of his crusade.  Since his death, the movement he symbolized has stagnated.  The recent election of the first (half) black President only illustrates the point.  Obama was raised by whites--his mother and his grandparents.  He embraced Afro-American culture in early adulthood.   However, that embrace does not negate the fact of his background--the fact that being raised with a white mother in white households dramatically altered his point-of-view from that of your typical Afro-American (a term I will use throughout in reference to American descendants of African slaves vs., for instance, a Haitian or Nigerian immigrant). 

This shift in point-of-view played a significant role in his ability to win the presidency.  What many of us take personally, he takes intellectually.  He inherited none of the cultural 'can't haves' that Afro-Americans carry around.  Removed from American history's damage to blacks (his father was Kenyan, not American) he needn't take our Afro-American history personally.  He need not feel its sting.  The mother telling him that he could grow up to be President was a white woman.  Because he did not inherit a deep sense of exclusion, like the rest of us, he did not react to Republicans' dog whistle racist taunts by defending his American bona fides with litanies of forebears who had fought in wars or who had labored in southern fields, thereby evoking memories that discomfit so many.  He did not react defensively in learned fear of the less-than-American status of earlier black generations.  He carelessly flicked off the opposition's arrows.  He didn't have to remind America that he was part of a past that they want to forget.  Why?  Because he is not.  His past is not black America's past.  He had the luxury of ignoring it.  In doing so, he allowed America to follow suit, and so comforted, elect him President of these United States.

Far from proving how much progress Afro-Americans have made, Obama's election proves how far we have to go.   He cannot be held up as a direct example; we cannot follow in his footsteps:  Most of us were not raised by whites and do not imbibe mainstream white cultural attitudes about everything from history to the nature of our country.  Most of us do not call a white woman our mother.  Most of us do not call a non-American man our father.  Most of us are not raised largely in all-brown environments with a distinct distance from mainstream American culture (like Malaysia and Hawaii).  No.  He cannot be a direct example to us.  However, we can identify the elements which have allowed him to reach higher than most of us would have dared and adapt them to our own cultural and historical place in America.  

American descendants of African slaves find ourselves, 40 years after the civil rights movement, lagging economically, medically, professionally, educationally.  More importantly, we find ourselves struggling with a diminished sustaining sense of our cultural selves as a minority group.  It is this cultural sense of self that Obama seems to have cobbled together by uniting his unique mainstream upbringing with his adoption of Afro-American culture.  His first book is all about his work of self-creation.  It is this work that Afro-Americans, as a group with a shared history, have never done.  It is this work that our obsession with the civil rights Movement and its methods--long after the expiration date of both--has prevented. 

The election of a dark-skinned man with no personal, genetic attachment to Afro-American history will not prove the balm so many anticipate.  I can actually see it proving the opposite--a point of frustration.  "There's a black President, dammit.  What do you mean that apartment's rented when you still have the sign outside the door?"  Oakland descends into riots after the release of videotape showing the shooting death of an unarmed black man, hands shackled and lying on the ground as a transit cop seemingly assassinates him at point blank range.  The results of the 2008 election will not end American prejudice, bias, racialism or racism.  Job applicants with black-sounding names will still be 50% less likely to get a given job than those with less distinctive tags.  Blacks will continue to slip backwards--out of the middle class.  The growth of hate groups will not suddenly slow.   We will wake the day after Barack Obama's inauguration facing the same hurdles that confronted us prior.  The Dream will remain as elusive as it was the day before.

Two historically magnetic forces have kept us tethered to a civil rights era strategy bound to be half-successful because it accepted, on some fundamental levels, negative mainstream constructs about who we are, our place in American society, and the essence of the majority.  Barack Obama's unique upbringing combined with the work he chronicled to blend this part of his self with his adopted culture, freed him from all of the above.  It's time for the rest of us to use similar methods to construct equally independent identities based on a differing set of ingredients. 



Because of Martin Luther King's deep faith, he has been remembered as a man who believed that the pull to brotherhood could overcome what science now tells us are basic human characteristics--seeing those who do not look like us as "the other," trusting them less, and more readily assigning them negative attributes.  King, we're told, believed that the pull to brotherhood could overcome American history.  To that end, he preached the perfectibility of the white majority.  He taught that they could seamlessly overcome both history and biology.  He brilliantly flattered the majority and used their own beloved Christian symbolism to do it.  He gave them a vision of their own colorblind perfection, in which they attributed nothing more to dark skin than hue, and judged each individual not on the color of his skin, but on the content of his character.

It was a dream.  And it achieved its initial aim of shaming the majority through flattery, while arming Afro-Americans to fight laws that legalized our marginalization, humiliation and, often, brutalization.  It achieved its political aims brilliantly--but little more. As far as healing a people scarred by a history of chattel slavery, and governmentally sanctioned violence and humiliation, it was only a first step.

And then his death left an enormous gash in Afro-America's psyche.  It was as if a wound had only partially healed, and the shaman with the cure had died.  We'll never know how King would have ultimately evolved, where his leadership might have taken Afro-America, or what his long-term strategy might have been.  However, at the end, his leadership left us with a dream unfulfilled--a dream dependent upon the Christian goodness of the majority.  He left us with a dream--not the reality of the human animal that more easily belittles, reviles and hates those who do not look most like him, not the reality of a history that has taught us all to see black skin as a kind of scar--he left us with a dream that would be endlessly deferred, momentarily slaked with a grand symbolic flourishes but never sustained because it is a dream of human godliness, a dream easily interpreted as one of white men's perfection--so easily, in fact, that only two decades later, a conservative movement that raised itself up milking fears and hatred of black Americans would claim King's words and mantel as their own, and there would be nothing to be said against that usurpation, because, as if it were a cunning vampire, King himself had inadvertently invited it in. 

In 2006 The Washington Post began publishing a multi-part series entitled "Being a Black Man," based on the premise that "black men often feel caught between individual achievements and collective failures, defined more by their images in popular culture than their lived experiences."  The series highlighted a poll conducted in collaboration with Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation.  When black men were asked about the biggest problems facing them:

68% said racial discrimination was a "big problem."
91% said young black men did not take their educations seriously enough
88% said too many black men becoming involved in crime
88% said involvement in drug and alcohol abuse
87% said HIV/AIDS

In a similar vein, entertainer Bill Cosby has annoyed some and tickled others with his admonitions against black youth for "opting out" of mainstream society.  He made national headlines for, according to CNN, "upbraiding poor blacks for their grammar and [accusing] them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them."  Juan Williams, Sr. Correspondent for NPR Radio and political analyst for Fox News, expresses the ubiquitous lament on today's black American youth culture in a Washington Post op-ed.  He wrote:

Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.

However, Williams dresses his arguments against today's ills in yesterday's rags.  "Where," he asks, "are the marches demanding good schools for those children--and the strong cultural reinforcement for high academic achievement (instead of the charge that minority students who get good grades are "acting white")?"  He bemoans the poor results of a "search for identity"--a cultural issue--and then instinctually regresses to political civil rights clichés--marches, sit-ins, etc.--the political lifeblood of the old civil rights movement.  These tactics were highly effective in gaining legal recognition of our rights.  They are utterly useless in effecting cultural change within Afro-America.  Looking at the results of the Washington Post survey, that's what is most needed now.  It's time to jettison the old civil rights rhetoric, and set the stage for 21st century actions that might actually have an impact--an impact greater than allowing the zombified carcass of the 60s civil rights movement to nod sagely as it congratulates itself on massing yet another hoard of people to stand about shouting couplets to no lasting effect.
 
We now know that humans are naturally predisposed toward prejudice against those who look "different."  We are not sci-fi "creatures of light."  We are animals whose primate brains continue to look with suspicion and fear on those who are not like us.  Thus, we can officially stop the two-step dance of feigning shock that prejudice and racism still plague us and/or denying its existence.  It will always exist.  No amount of righteous Christian dreaming will change that.  And for a great long time its sting will be greater for Afro-Americans because a national cultural history of negative perceptions and stereotypes have been hard-wired into the American cultural circuit board.  It takes but a wink and a nod to evoke them.

In their book "The Black Image and the White Mind," Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki write:

... it is apparent that White racial attitudes have undergone a change that is neither insignificant nor yet fully consummated.  ... white racial thinking now spans a spectrum that runs from racial comity and understanding to ambivalence, then to animosity, and finally to outright racism.  The bulk of Whites exhibit ambivalence that may be tipped toward comity or hostility depending on the interaction of the political climate, personal experience, and mediated communications.

(When someone is "ambivalent" and can be "pushed" to racial animosity toward a group due to general atmospheric conditions, that someone is infected with racism--perhaps not yet downright poxy with it, but certainly infected.)

There is but one way to prepare Afro-Americans, descendants of African slaves, to thrive within this intermittently hostile atmosphere.  But it demands that we put aside hundreds of years of humiliation and shame.  It demands that we look at ourselves and build a common cultural--not political--foundation based on our sojourn in America, based on our unique history and the certifiable triumphs we've pulled from it.  It demands that we acknowledge that our insistent cultural (as opposed to political) identification with blacks of other cultures is, at least in part, a reflection of the majority's contempt--our inability to see ourselves through our own eyes instead of theirs, see our own indigenous cultural value, and codify a unique, sustaining American cultural identity upon it. 

Sustaining cultures--cultures that sustain their inhabitants--provide a sense of entitlement, and even superiority to those who nestle within them.  Per University of Kentucky psychologist Margot Monteith, "To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It's likely a built-in mechanism."  Name me a culture that boasts that its people are equal to other peoples.  They don't; they boast instead superiority.  They also have common delineators, usually based on varying combinations of history and ethnicity.  We are Afro-Americans--the American descendants of African slaves.  We are not Haitians, Nigerians, Gambians or Sudanese.  We are "black" people as much as we are "bipedal", and cultural identification as "black" is only marginally more valuable; the term "African-American" is merely one half-step more descriptive.  It fails to distinguish between a native born Kenyan who moved to Brooklyn two years ago and an American descendant of African slaves--between Charlize Theron and myself.  Of course, to suggest that either of those sets shared intimate cultural bonds would be asinine.  Africa is part of our history--an important part, but it is no substitute for a rapprochement and full acknowledgment of the more recent past that bleeds into and fully colors our American present.
  
If you ask ten Afro-Americans from different locales and socioeconomic backgrounds what Afro-American culture is, you'd get factious answers. Some will talk about hip-hop and rap.  Some about religion, some about jazz, some about Africa.  But these are all just cultural flotsam, outgrowths... cultural results.  From what are they born?  I don't think we've ever self-defined that--the fundamentals of Afro-American culture--shared cultural touchstones and definitions that allow us, like other cultures, to celebrate our glories, and ingest a sense of cultural superiority and entitlement.  What have our American horrors taught us and how have we wrested from them unique ways of thinking about issues such as God, history, death... How has our perception of the world been formed by our American experience, and how does that experience in all of its horror and all of its glory, allow us to be better, smarter, more perceptive than our fellow Americans who have not had the privilege of being born into it.  How has it provided us cultural tools second to none in America?  Barack Obama had a white mother and guardians injecting him with the majority's positive views of self, history and culture.  Most of us don't have that luxury.


Define "Culture"
 
Webster's Ninth - 5a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. 5b. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

"...transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations."  What formal knowledge do Afro-Americans customarily transmit from generation to generation about our distinct sub-culture?  This is something at which we have consistently failed.  So intent have we been on first righteously fighting persecution, and then, less righteously, on perfecting the majority via politics a la the King.   I remember consistently seeing the book "To Be a Jew" on the bookshelves of high school friends of mine.  Was there any such book in my house regarding being an American descendant of African slaves?  There was not.  The Jewish kids I knew went to Hebrew School on weekends and sometimes after school.  Jews had learned not to abandon their distinct cultural education to the majority.  They had learned that the majority simply does not, and has no reason to care.

During my formative years, I had several advantages that changed my personal cultural circumstance.  First, I was comfortably middle class.  Second, I was 10 in 1968, and living in Washington, D.C., a place full of middle class blacks.  Third, the civil rights movement was reaching its zenith, and Afro-American life, history, culture, practice and theory were alive in the air all around me.  And most importantly, my mother was born of a distinct sub-culture that afforded her all the things I hope for Afro-America at large:  A culture nurtured and passed down from generation to generation that provided, in part, a sense of self-worth, entitlement, and yes, even superiority.

My mother was born and raised a New Orleans Creole.  That means that she was part of an upper caste in Afro-American society dating back hundreds of years.  These were half-breeds, quadroons, octaroons whom whites considered tainted by their black blood, but who were afforded and took special status and privilege due to the light skin they wore.  They were the sons and daughters of slave masters and overseers, and seized their special status to become more prosperous than other blacks.
 
Their ability to attain this was based on a grotesque belief:  the closer to white, the better you were.  However, creoles wrested from this baseness a society they considered as cultured as the white, while taking their place as the elite of the black.  In addition, they seem to have considered themselves prettier than either, and were not above holding both in contempt.
 
It was my good fortune to be born into such arrogance, to be the progeny of people who somehow managed to consider themselves more clever, more resourceful, and more wise than those around them due to their unique history and place in society--despite all the lies, half-truths and contradictions their place bespoke.   Because of the high esteem in which they held themselves, they made a point of passing along the idea that I was part of something unique and special, worthy of careful maintenance.  They made a point of passing that glowing aspect of their particular cultural information from generation to generation.

Everything the majority had was ours, I was taught, but nothing of ours was theirs.  We had what they had--but more.  That lesson should be one passed from every generation of Afro-American to the next.  We must not only be armed with a thorough and exacting knowledge and level of comfort with the mainstream culture, but in addition, we must be loaded for bear with our own American creation myths, our own American histories, passed among ourselves that exalt us, defining ourselves, finally, once and for all.  What's theirs is ours.  What's ours is not theirs.  It is DuBois' dilemma, but recast from a dilemma to a blessing.


Loving DuBois' Dilemma, Daily

Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims and all other Americans share American culture.  We have our enduring creation myths: George Washington cannot tell a lie; our Founding Fathers, "with liberty and justice for all" to name a few.  Regardless of the degree to which we accept these myths, they bind us.  The history surrounding them is part of our public education.  We pass this knowledge from generation to generation.
     
This knowledge, this culture, belongs as much to me, a black man, as it does to any white man or woman.  To thrive in America, Afro-Americans must be of this culture, must know it inside and out.  Joni Mitchell and Charles Ives are mine as much as they are any other American's.  But then, I also have Mingus.  If whites want him, he can be theirs as well.  He is part of their culture too.  But with that great man I share a history that will forever be out of reach for most whites.  That shared history, that likeness, that connection gives me unique access to musical spaces that will probably forever be unreachable to those who are not Afro-American.  Let me explain:  I, for instance, will never know what it means to be a Native American and watch a typical Hollywood Western.  I can appreciate the lie of the Hollywood product.  I can distantly appreciate the pain that it could inflict on a Native American, but I will never have the experience watching that film that a man or woman of that culture will have, because I am not of their culture.  Similarly, there are experiences of things Afro-American that will forever be out of reach for most others.  I have a friend who is obsessed with R&B.  Knows it backwards and sideways.  Yet, he never understood Aretha Franklin's place was not just musical--it was cultural.  Hollering "Freedom" in 1967 through every radio in America meant infinitely more to Afro-Americans than it did to him.  To us, it was visceral, political and personal.  To him, it was great music.  As Afro-Americans, we share a slice of America that is unique to us.  Yet, mainstream America and its culture are ours as much as any white man or woman's.  The only thing of theirs, as Americans, that we cannot claim, is their historical contempt for us (and in some ways we come frighteningly close to that as well).
 
So we're back to DuBois' conundrum, the "double consciousness" of the Afro-American.  It means that we have the additional "burden" of learning our own history, comings, goings and the ways of being they have bred in us, in addition to learning all that the majority learns.  But it also means that the additional benefit of knowing our own history, comings, goings and the ways of being they have bred in us.  It is our leg up.  It is our superiority.
 
People like Bill Cosby ask the extraordinary of Afro-Americans.  Where he too often fails is in acknowledging that it is extraordinary, acknowledging the bravery and smarts required to accomplish it, and expressing his belief that Afro-Americans are more than capable of it. 
This is about accomplishing the extraordinary.  It is about nothing less than codifying a cultural experience, advancing it from the vernacular, to the formal.  To do so, you must first dispel the fear and humiliation borne of hundreds of years of the constant threat and too-frequent reality of this...



And this...
 


And this...
 



Rational fear born of experience has led so many blacks to be repulsed by the majority that we reject crucial pieces of our own past as well as American "things" that we feel reek of "them."  How do you acknowledge that there is something poisonous in the very culture that literally helped create you?  How do you acknowledge that the existence of your cultural being is due to the hatred of your countrymen?  How do you reconcile your fear, and yes, sometimes, hatred of the majority culture for what it did and tolerated for so long, with an embrace of the majority culture of which you are a part?
  
There is an extraordinary amount of thinking, and heavy lifting we must do.
 
I can hear, and understand the complaint.  "But white people don't have to do that.  Why should we?  That's not equality. White folks don't have to work harder."  No, they don't.  That's because they were born white and a majority in this country.  That is because they are less than we.  We were born minorities here, thus we bear that extra burden and the ultimate cultural benefit of dealing with the crimes and the hate and the fear and the legacy, half-embracing, half-rejecting, and pulling from all of it a rich and gorgeous subculture that sustains us.  Is it fair?  No.  It is not.  But if the Afro-American experience has taught us one thing, it should be this:  "What has 'fair' got to do with anything?"

Barack Obama on his invitation to Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inaugural:  What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.

*

Rick Warren: But the issue to me is, I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

[Interviewer]: Do you think, though, that they are equivalent to having gays getting married?

Rick Warren: Oh I do...

*

Barack Obama asks that we avoid disagreeability; however, he does not consider Warren's comparison of gays to pedophiles and incestuous siblings to be "disagreeable"--just our criticism of his decision.

Obama invited preacher/gospel singer and well-known homophobe Donnie McClurkin to perform at one of his campaign rallies during the Democratic primaries.  Obama defended that decision with similar "big tent," "reach across divides," "I support equality" language.  He has repeatedly stated his opposition to gay marriage.

At this point, I think it's fair to say that Obama suffers toward gays what a great many Americans suffer towards blacks and women--a soft bigotry.  He believes in equality and may vigorously advocate for it, but to him, we remain just a little shy three-dimensionally human.  To him we are "issues" not people.  For him, that some believe we should not exist is a sociopolitical disagreement--like taking exception to where a dam should be built.  It is not disparaging one's being, because, in his eyes, there's a little less human there to begin with. 

Obama would never employ similar tactics or language with anyone who suggested that Israel was a rogue nation or that African-Americans' rights should be "up to the states."  Obama's support for gay rights--and his lingering distaste for gay lifestyle--simply puts him on a par with a majority of Americans.  It's a political win-win for him. 

Like most who harbor soft bigotries, Obama probably considers himself enlightened and free from prejudice.  He hires gays, he reaches out to them, etc.  But I've had several very liberal, very educated, highly "enlightened" whites make excruciatingly racist comments in my presence and not realize what their comments betrayed until confronted. 

When you are taught from birth to revile a certain minority group, smarts and doctorates do not dispel that teaching.  Smarts and doctorates suggest that there is no rational reason for you to feel that way, so you outwardly change your behavior.  But a voice deep down keeps singing... "they're less, they're dirty."   That's when it becomes safe to turn an entire group of people and their ability to live and love as freely as their fellow citizens into an "issue," as opposed to a "right." 

 

I've often wondered what it might mean to "feel" American--to truly accept its glories and shame as my own.  Looking at and listening to the Cindy McCains, George W. Bushes and Ronald Reagans of the world, I've wondered.  The country they describe bears so little resemblance to the one in which I've lived, very different from the one in which my parents were raised.  When they speak of American moral supremacy, of unsullied American justice and righteousness, of the deathless wisdom of the Founders, I cringe.  Such statements omit me.  For 188 of this nation's 232 year history it was legal in America for a white man to first own or destroy my black life at will; and subsequently, it was legal to erase me and those like me from the mainstream of social, economic, and political life.  This latter was apartheid, as deadly and vicious as that ugly word implies. 

Yet, we speak of an unsullied America, an America somehow free from sin, a past and perpetual shining city on the hill for all men and women.  That is a lie.  My parents' lives prove it is a lie, as did theirs before them.  And yes, as their offspring, I prove it is a lie.  It is my duty as their offspring to remind America that it is a lie.  I owe it to them and what they sacrificed to remind us all that the McCains and Bushes and Reagans continue the tradition of omitting the sons and daughters of African slaves.  I owe it to my forebears to remember that this perfect, mythical country is one where my past is quashed--psychologically deleted... one in which I am deleted.  In this mythical, exceptional land, I am the blight that must be forgotten.  I am its version of the shunned Victorian madwoman prone to blurt the family's filthy secrets, locked in an attic to keep them hidden.  The secrets slowly poison everything beneath the capacious manor roof, but the residents suffer the rot and stench to maintain their precious image of upright sanctimony.

Barack Obama, the half-black son of a Kenyan and a Kansan--and unmistakably "black" man who has unwaveringly adopted Afro-American culture, has just been elected President of the United States.  Some will say that this proves American racism is dead.  Some, like the Reagans and the Bushes and their political brethren, have been saying that for decades, and it remains transparently ignorant and self-serving.  Countless tales from this election alone prove the point (here, here, and here, for a small taste.)  There is ample research to prove that we have neither outgrown our American cultural history nor our animal distrust f those who don't look like us.  

No, this election does not mean the end of American prejudice, bias, racialism or racism.  Job applicants with black-sounding names will still be 50% less likely to get a given job than those with less distinctive tags.  However, the election does have deep meaning, particularly to me, and I'll be so bold as to suggest that I may speak for many other blacks as well.  I am not trying to belittle the satisfaction that whites might feel at this sign of progress--their own progress. However, such satisfaction is only personal if one overcame a conscious distaste for blacks in order to push the "Obama" button.  If not, the satisfaction is second-hand; it's an easy kumbaya moment.  It costs nothing emotionally.  It demands that you neither acknowledge an altered reality about yourself, nor adjust any long-held belief.

I have often wondered what it meant to feel fully American.  Today, I received my first glimpse.  I have no illusions.  I know that the country's catastrophic state bears as much credit for the Obama victory as his rational, intelligent response to it, and his skillful, disciplined campaign.  Nonetheless, it is heartening to think that issues can trump our ugly racial scars--that we can stop picking at the scabs long enough to consider our own self-interest above our historical prejudice.  Considering from whence we've come, that is huge.  Think of all the blood that has been shed to get here.  Hundreds of thousands died on U.S. soil to preserve the right to keep me in literal chains--to own me like you'd own a dog.  Sociologists Steward E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck identified

"2805 [documented] victims of lynch mobs killed between 1882 and 1930 in ten southern states. Although mobs murdered almost 300 white men and women, the vast majority- almost 2,500-of lynch victims were African-American. Of these black victims, 94 percent died in the hands of white lynch mobs. The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob."

According to a SurveyUSA poll, 58% of black voters support Proposition 8, which would enshrine irrational fear and rank bigotry into the California Constitution in order to deny gays the right to marry.  Black support is 10% higher than support of any other ethnic group.  This is ironic, considering that in striking down the law banning same sex marriage, the California Supreme Court cited the landmark 1967 civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia that struck down the prohibition of interracial marriage. 

A majority of California's voting African-Americans seem blind to that irony, however.  They see no kinship to their own past as a reviled minority whose sexual touch toward a single white man or woman would sully the entire "race" of American whites--just as legally sanctioning the sexual touch of same sex partners would so sully heterosexuals' unions that they will... what?  Seek immediate divorce?  Abandon their children to the streets?  Suffer mass orgasmic dysfunction?

58% of the black voting population sees no irony in accepting a "separate but equal" status for gays despite the fact that the Supreme Court freed us from just such subjugation with Brown vs. Board of Education; without it we would still be classifiable as second class citizens.

We see no slippery slope in enshrining hatred and bigotry against a specific group into our ruling document--our California Constitution.  If we can enshrine the second-class citizenship of gays with respect to marriage, why not the second-class citizenship of blacks with respect to education, or Hispanics with respect to citizenship itself?   Someone will always hate you with equal vociferousness to your hate for someone else.  It's simply a matter of convincing enough to do so--as has been done in convincing 58% of blacks to support the same kind of irrational hatred that kept us in figurative shackles for most of the last century.

We say its "Jesus."  Jesus says... It's because Jesus hates the fags... The Bible says so...  First, the Bible does not.  The Bible contains no imprecations against homosexuality stronger than those against the eating of pork.  Bacon anyone?    

Secondly, it wasn't that long ago that the Bible (thrust upon our ancestors to make them more accepting of their enslavement) supposedly preached that black skin was a curse from God.  The Curse of Ham or Noah's Curse infected Christianity and became a justification for our debasement.  We were accursed of God, just like gays are supposed to be today.  Jesus said so.  The Bible said so.

That debasement is still at work.  I believe its lingering effects account for much of that 58% black support for the repellant Proposition 8.  Throughout American history, black men could not protect themselves, much less their families, from the predations of the majority, who could own, rape, maim and kill you and yours at will.  Later, they could heap endless indignities upon you for your kith and kin to see; and there was not a damned thing in the world you could do about it.  In the traditional sense of manhood, black men did not qualify.  Once we began to develop some sense of self-respect, we overcompensated with a black buck hypermasculinity that's still apparent today.  From blaxploitation movies to gangsta rap, it's been a constant in the images with which we're entertained. 

Fear feeds those images.  Fear of being once more less than a man, less than able to protect and defend what is yours.  Fear of once again being treated as the dirt beneath white men's feet.  Fear fuels Proposition 8.  It's like some sci-fi creature that feeds on it; and we blacks have so much of it in reserve. 

That 58% number makes me sorry for us all right now.  It reminds me of what we've been through, and how it allows us to be manipulated by the same racialist, religious right zealots who've spent the last 40 years trying to deny us our rights to equal housing, equal educational opportunities, equal voting rights, and equal treatment under the law. 

Today, our attempts to defend our pride in the manhood of our men, we only prove that we're still vulnerable to whims of those who've most reviled us.  We're ready to open the door to the legalization of bigotry--a door through which we too might one day be shoved.  We're not defending our "manly" bona fides through supporting Prop 8.  We're only proving how damaged we remain.  

Fifty percent of this year’s Republican playbook is typically divisive Rove Culture Wars.  The other fifty percent is all about racial signs and symbols. Georgia GOP Congressan Lynn Westmoreland finally came right out and called Obama “uppity,” kindly leaving the inevitable to our imaginations.

The Republicans have not changed.  They are still rifling the moldering locker of Nixonian campaign tactics, which itself picked George Wallace’s campaign pockets.  A Wallace campaign aide described it as “Promise them the moon and holler “Nigger.”

The New York Times noted the overwhelming whiteness of the Republican convention: 

According to polls of delegates conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, 93 percent of the Republican delegates are white (compared with 85 percent in 2004 and 89 percent in 2000), while 5 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black. The Democratic delegate pool in Denver, according to the survey, was 65 percent white, 23 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic, roughly the same as at other recent Democratic conventions.

The poll also found that men accounted for 68 percent of Republican delegates (compared with 57 percent in 2004) and about half the Democratic delegates.

Ditto The Washington Post:

The look in the convention hall is similar to that of a typical McCain event. This summer, for instance, 67 people showed up for one of his town hall meetings in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. One of them was black.

Sarah Palin hails from Alaska, and her Republican biography paints her as the daughter of some halcyon, trailer-trashy, all-white American yesterday, where rough, shotgun-toting babes dropped a young’un at 16, bit the cord with their teeth and shot and skinned a moose the same night.  It’s a rural, 19th century American vision of “rugged individualism” in a 21st century urban nation within a global economy.

It harkens back to a time when you didn’t have to rely on anyone else for anything.  No government handouts (despite the fact that Alaska subsists on them). No Social Security.  No one telling you whom you couldn’t fail to hire or what you couldn’t call them at work.  It’s a vulgarized vision of the Reagan’s America.  But instead of the Hollywood high gloss, this time’s it’s covered in dried moose blood.  Palin is Reagan’s unshielded political Id.  Instead of teenaged unwed motherhood being a source of shame, it’s now a point of pride—for white girls, that is.

Yes, the Republican vision remains an indelibly white one.  Reagan’s appeal invoked a pre-civil/women’s rights America as a state of perfection to which we should return.  His gift was his ability to package that vision of the past as a roadmap to the future.  By allowing the sons o’ Karl rove to tap right wing ideologue Palin as his VP, McCain has now fully assembled the un-American (read: non-white) shredder through which he hopes to shove Barack Obama.  He’s painting an iconographic vision of a long dead past, packaging it as change for tomorrow, and hoping that working class whites will fall for it.  But more than that, it symbolizes bold opposition to the alternative. 

‘Look at that dark vision,’ he says.  ‘Look at them with their Ivy League degrees and their perfect little girls, looking down on you with your high school diploma, and your kids with little hope of better.  [According to Slate’s Hanna Rosin, Sarah Palin’s baby-daddy called himself a “fucking redneck” on his MySpace page before it was taken down.]  What is this Obama future they represent?  Where do you rednecks fit into it?  Now, look at me.  I hail from the day before their kind, when folks like you had a fighting chance, and my running mate, you know what she’d do with her gun if their kind came around.’ 

McCain will do nothing to give their kind that fighting chance.  He just hopes to signify a day when they still had one, and prays that they’re too dumb to realize that it’s his ilk who stole it from them.  

At some point, Barack Obama had to decide if he wanted to be President, or a prophet; if he wanted to lead a government, or a Movement.   In the primary, the whole "Movement" schtick worked.  He was the insurgent, he had an front-running opponent he could vilify, and the issue (Iraq) on which to pillory her for a Democratic primary audience, a percentage of which was ripe for participation in an orgy of self-congratulatory 60s nostalgia all dressed up in the effortless chintz of "change." 

But it wasn't working in the general.  He's no longer the insurgent.  He's the nominee.  He's no longer a Chicago grass roots organizer; he's the head of the Democratic party, in bed with Wall Street Kingpins and Capitol Kingmakers, armed with a war chest that would make Croesus blush. 

Yet he was still temped to play the political Pied Piper.  Instead of simply telling us how, as President, he would make our lives better, he invited us--no, insisted--that we join his "movement."  The whole movement aspect began to cloud his message.  He was not telling Americans why we'd be better off with him as President than we would with McCain.  His loud, clanking Movement machine was so busy belching smoke and pinwheels, the electorate couldn't get a good look at him.  

His campaign seemed to mistake size for substance.  Getting tens of thousands of people to show up does not mean you have a social "movement."  It means you're a hot ticket.  This central miscalculation allowed the Republicans to hammer Obama as an empty suit.  It has kept everyone asking who he is and what he stands for despite an endless primary season that should have definitively answered such questions.  

By now, the prophet thing is all so much yesterday's news.  Earl Ofari Hutchinson did a nice job of narrating progressives' spasmodic gyrations to justify Obama's shift on legalizing lawbreaking with the FISA bill, toleration of those who voted for the Iraq war, downshifting on a woman's right to chose, sidling up to Rick Warren at Saddleback Ranch and telling a crowd of evangelicals that he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman (but assuring us queers that we could have a back 'o the bus alternative.) 

With this schism between his primary and campaign selves, you'd think he'd be sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge his mere politician's status and get on with it.  In his acceptance speech, he finally did. 

However, vestiges of the old, self-important movement mentality remain.  I just received a lengthy solicitation missive from the Obama camp.  I read most of the first page, looking for the salutation at the bottom.  Then I saw a second page.  Then I saw that there was a full page of text on the back of the first page.  And there was a full third page, and yet more text on the back of that third page.

The campaign was asking me to read 4 pages of political junk mail before it got to its point.  And then--4 pages not being enough--it had a frackin' P.S:  "At so many decisive movements in our history we've seen one person stand up--and then another, and another still--until a movement was formed that could bring about change."  He's asking you to write a bloody check, not face the dogs and water cannons on a protest line.  Get a grip.

He kept such fluffery to a minimum in his speech.  He talked policy, and what he wanted to do as President.  He eschewed the political equivalent of putting his hands down our pants.  He finally realized that some of us are not looking to join a "movement."  We just want to vote for a President.  Some of us don't get teary at the word "Kennedy."  Some of us are dead sick of self-righteous invocations of Martin Luther King.  Some of us are not saving an empty place at the table for the second coming of RFK.

Believe it or not, some of us are just looking for the best politician with the best policies to vote for.  And we get turned off when a simple politician so loudly insists that he is so much more.  Finally, in his acceptance speech, Obama showed us the politician, and left the prophet to the True Believers.

 

 

 

 

Three years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the homes of hundreds thousands of Louisianans, too many residents are still unable to afford to rebuild their homes or find an affordable place to rent, according to a new housing report by the national research and advocacy group PolicyLink.

The new report, "A Long Way Home: The State of Housing Recovery in Louisiana 2008," shows that while some progress has been made during the past year, thousands of residents who want to return home are facing a critical rental housing shortage, inadequate rebuilding grants and a recovery plagued by red tape and ever-changing rules.

- Wall Street Journal MarketWatch, 8/21/08

 If the history of the Katrina recovery were written today, it would be a tragedy. Far too little progress has been made despite the remarkable effort and ingenuity of the people of the region who are fighting to restore their homes and their lives.

- Raymond C. Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America

A version of the following appeared in Archipelago magazine less than one year after Hurricane Katrina. Three years after Katrina, it still holds true:

It was more than obvious. Large portions of New Orleans would never be rebuilt. Soon after Katrina, a reporter and I agreed on this. Too many of the people in the most devastated areas were poor. Too many were black. And, in the context of American history, those are hereditary crimes with recurrent sentences.

“You’re nothing if you’re poor and black,” my New Orleans-reared mother used to say. Clawing her way to a comfortable middle-class with her Louisana-bred husband, this was her desperate way of goading me into non-acceptance—non-acceptance of the 60s and 70s status quo of the all-black school, the segregated neighborhood, the “comfort zone” of black life as it stood back then.  It was her warning that, at worst, the majority has contempt for you, and at best, is simply indifferent to you, and your sufferings or hardships.  ‘You’re on your own,’ she was saying.  ‘There is no country behind you, no countrymen support you, no government promotes your interest.’

You’re on your own.

Throughout history, blacks got the slops.  Slaves ate what was left after the white folks took the best.  Blacks were allowed to live only where white folks didn’t want to.  Thus, black neighborhoods are often the most vulnerable to natural, and man made disaster.  When I lived in the then middle-class Ponchartrain Park area of New Orleans, the streets regularly flooded during the summer heavy rains.  Six inches of water for children to play in.  It receded an hour or so later.  To me, it was just one of many freakish novelties that marked this place malevolent, foreign, as somehow antithetical to my well-being.  Though young, I found its climate insufferable, its insects primordial, its flora sinister, its racism pernicious.  New Orleans seemed a place where I could never have the best.  It seemed a place where folks like me were limited to what the white folks let us have.  My antipathy was so strong it has lasted for decades.  Once I had a choice in the matter, I never returned to New Orleans.  Instead of “home”—the place that made my mother and father and all of my relatives what they were—New Orleans was a threat—a negative object lesson in acceptance.  With large black swaths of the city largely decimated, it’s now much easier to articulate why.

Black New Orleanians rightly take a lot of pride in having built communities from the shards and pieces they were allowed in this deep south former slave port.  The community ties date back generations, with family homes and land regarded reverentially.  In many cases, it was the only thing of value people had.  Holding onto it was everything.

That’s why the prospect of losing homes and land is so devastating in New Orleans’ poor black communities.  It was the only thing so many had.  They had sacrificed, fought, scraped and struggled for generations to own, and now… it’s gone.  It’s particularly galling that it’s gone because of incompetence, indifference and inaction.  But that’s what my mother warned me about.  It’s the warning of which black New Orleanians, and black Americans in general, take too little heed.

 Pride in accomplishment is natural, but don’t dare ignore that the accomplishment is built on a foundation of impoverishment and limits imposed from without.  Yes, blacks built a community, but we built in a disaster zone—because that’s the only place in New Orleans where we were allowed to build. 

The Brown University professor of sociology John R. Logan found that damaged areas of New Orleans were 75% black.  Undamaged areas were 46% black.  Yes, blacks lived in the most dangerous, flood-prone areas.  According the The Boston Globe, the Logan study “found that if New Orleans’ returning population was limited to the neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, about half the white population would not return and 80% of its black population would not.”

History dictated that 80% of New Orleans black population rely on a government of the majority to protect them from looming disaster.  Predictably, the federal government shirked that responsibility. Prior to Katrina, the Bush administration was warned that a devastating hurricane striking New Orleans was among the most likely US disaster scenarios.  However, subsequent to that warning, the administration CUT New Orleans flood control funding by 44%.  According to the Washington Post, “…President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities...”  From the federal government, Louisiana will get 6.2 billion dollars to help an estimated 200,000 homeowners.  Mississippi will receive 5 billion to help an estimated 50,000.   And that is for New Orleans homeowners—the comparatively affluent ones.  The contempt tinged with hatred for the black and poorest was brutally crystallized in a statement from Rep. Richard H. Baker, 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge. “ We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” he was overheard telling lobbyists, “We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

 “You’re on your own,” my New Orleans-reared mother insisted.

Pride is a strange thing.  American descendants of African slaves were forced on penalty of death to accept little more than scraps throughout most of this nation’s history.  When we, through dint of sheer creativity, work and will turned those scraps into homes and communities, we took great pride in the accomplishment.  However, it is at our peril that we don’t realize that the accomplishments are built, quite literally, on shaky ground—that the pride must be tempered with practicality.  There are aspects of the past that we cannot “recover” or “rehabilitate.”  Through will, work and pride, we cannot elevate low-lying land and stop the winds from blowing.  And now we know that we cannot expect governments of the majority to care enough to preserve our past, or value our pride, or our history.

The fact that we were denied our rights to live securely is a point of pain.  That we built communities from that denial is a point of pride.  With Katrina, the painful root of that pride emerged; and it devastated so many of us.   

How many orchids can you grow in fetid soil?  We’ve managed many: Music, art, literature, forms of speech and worship so powerful that they’ve seduced the majority into imitation.  But there are limits.  We cannot cling desperately to lands earmarked for destruction by no less than nature—just because we were forced to do so in the past.

The cast of the film “Crash” appeared on a recent Oprah Winfrey show.  The discussion turned to the word “nigger.”  Winfrey said she found the word irredeemable.  Some of the black male cast members differed.  Some noted the distinction between the word “nigger” and the term “nigga,” the latter, they claimed, being a non-racist endearment. For centuries, whites used “nigger” to humiliate and utterly dehumanize us.  It suggested we were less than dogs in the speakers’ minds.  We weren’t people.  We were “niggers.”  Disposable.  Utilities.  Property.  Owned.  Chattel.  Since slavery, it has been used as a reminder—to insist that we’re still less than human.  The word still stinks of violence.  You hear it, and you’re ready to fight or flee.  It’s the inevitable soundtrack to a hate crime.

Hundreds of years ago, blacks so internalized the hatred and dehumanization under which we lived that we began calling each other “nigger.”  I remember hearing my father and his friends… “That nigger don’t know a goddamned thing about…”  “That nigger is so rich he doesn’t know what to do with his money.”  They might be discussing someone they loathed, or someone they admired, but either way, “nigger” could be attached.  The use of the word suggested a brotherhood—a brotherhood of the despised.  It suggested acceptance into the class of the accursed. 

I never understood the use of the word; I never used it.  I was raised in mainly white environments.  Only rarely lived in all-black ones.  I was never part of a large community of blacks for a long time and never felt myself someone worthy of reference—through brotherhood or hatred—as “nigger.”  That may be my loss.  It may be my gain.  But to me, the insistence that the word has been neutered because blacks use it with each other is absurd.  It still seems the tag of a community of the accursed.  That you accept that status, even speak of it with pride, does not elevate it.  “Nigga,” is “nigger.”  That white boys now use it with each other is just another piece of noble savage wannabe-ism—insiders toying with outsider poses, safe in the knowledge they will never suffer its consequences.  With “nigga,” again we desperately take the scraps we were given—ignoring the historical hatred from which they sprung—and try to mold them into a source of pride.  We took the low-lying land in New Orleans—forced to ignore the historical hatred from which access sprung—and fashioned from it a source of pride—for a while, until history, as it will when your pride lets you forget it, snatched the last word.

In a yearlong review of levee work here, The Associated Press has tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood.

- Cain Burdeau, Associated Press, 8/23/08

 

 

Three years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the homes of hundreds thousands of Louisianans, too many residents are still unable to afford to rebuild their homes or find an affordable place to rent, according to a new housing report by the national research and advocacy group PolicyLink.

The new report, "A Long Way Home: The State of Housing Recovery in Louisiana 2008," shows that while some progress has been made during the past year, thousands of residents who want to return home are facing a critical rental housing shortage, inadequate rebuilding grants and a recovery plagued by red tape and ever-changing rules.

- Wall Street Journal MarketWatch, 8/21/08

 If the history of the Katrina recovery were written today, it would be a tragedy. Far too little progress has been made despite the remarkable effort and ingenuity of the people of the region who are fighting to restore their homes and their lives.

- Raymond C. Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America

A version of the following appeared in Archipelago magazine less than one year after Hurricane Katrina. Three years after Katrina, it still holds true:

It was more than obvious. Large portions of New Orleans would never be rebuilt. Soon after Katrina, a reporter and I agreed on this. Too many of the people in the most devastated areas were poor. Too many were black. And, in the context of American history, those are hereditary crimes with recurrent sentences.

“You’re nothing if you’re poor and black,” my New Orleans-reared mother used to say. Clawing her way to a comfortable middle-class with her Louisana-bred husband, this was her desperate way of goading me into non-acceptance—non-acceptance of the 60s and 70s status quo of the all-black school, the segregated neighborhood, the “comfort zone” of black life as it stood back then.  It was her warning that, at worst, the majority has contempt for you, and at best, is simply indifferent to you, and your sufferings or hardships.  ‘You’re on your own,’ she was saying.  ‘There is no country behind you, no countrymen support you, no government promotes your interest.’

You’re on your own.

Throughout history, blacks got the slops.  Slaves ate what was left after the white folks took the best.  Blacks were allowed to live only where white folks didn’t want to.  Thus, black neighborhoods are often the most vulnerable to natural, and man made disaster.  When I lived in the then middle-class Ponchartrain Park area of New Orleans, the streets regularly flooded during the summer heavy rains.  Six inches of water for children to play in.  It receded an hour or so later.  To me, it was just one of many freakish novelties that marked this place malevolent, foreign, as somehow antithetical to my well-being.  Though young, I found its climate insufferable, its insects primordial, its flora sinister, its racism pernicious.  New Orleans seemed a place where I could never have the best.  It seemed a place where folks like me were limited to what the white folks let us have.  My antipathy was so strong it has lasted for decades.  Once I had a choice in the matter, I never returned to New Orleans.  Instead of “home”—the place that made my mother and father and all of my relatives what they were—New Orleans was a threat—a negative object lesson in acceptance.  With large black swaths of the city largely decimated, it’s now much easier to articulate why.

Black New Orleanians rightly take a lot of pride in having built communities from the shards and pieces they were allowed in this deep south former slave port.  The community ties date back generations, with family homes and land regarded reverentially.  In many cases, it was the only thing of value people had.  Holding onto it was everything.

That’s why the prospect of losing homes and land is so devastating in New Orleans’ poor black communities.  It was the only thing so many had.  They had sacrificed, fought, scraped and struggled for generations to own, and now… it’s gone.  It’s particularly galling that it’s gone because of incompetence, indifference and inaction.  But that’s what my mother warned me about.  It’s the warning of which black New Orleanians, and black Americans in general, take too little heed.

 Pride in accomplishment is natural, but don’t dare ignore that the accomplishment is built on a foundation of impoverishment and limits imposed from without.  Yes, blacks built a community, but we built in a disaster zone—because that’s the only place in New Orleans where we were allowed to build. 

The Brown University professor of sociology John R. Logan found that damaged areas of New Orleans were 75% black.  Undamaged areas were 46% black.  Yes, blacks lived in the most dangerous, flood-prone areas.  According the The Boston Globe, the Logan study “found that if New Orleans’ returning population was limited to the neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, about half the white population would not return and 80% of its black population would not.”

History dictated that 80% of New Orleans black population rely on a government of the majority to protect them from looming disaster.  Predictably, the federal government shirked that responsibility. Prior to Katrina, the Bush administration was warned that a devastating hurricane striking New Orleans was among the most likely US disaster scenarios.  However, subsequent to that warning, the administration CUT New Orleans flood control funding by 44%.  According to the Washington Post, “…President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities...”  From the federal government, Louisiana will get 6.2 billion dollars to help an estimated 200,000 homeowners.  Mississippi will receive 5 billion to help an estimated 50,000.   And that is for New Orleans homeowners—the comparatively affluent ones.  The contempt tinged with hatred for the black and poorest was brutally crystallized in a statement from Rep. Richard H. Baker, 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge. “ We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” he was overheard telling lobbyists, “We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

 “You’re on your own,” my New Orleans-reared mother insisted.

Pride is a strange thing.  American descendants of African slaves were forced on penalty of death to accept little more than scraps throughout most of this nation’s history.  When we, through dint of sheer creativity, work and will turned those scraps into homes and communities, we took great pride in the accomplishment.  However, it is at our peril that we don’t realize that the accomplishments are built, quite literally, on shaky ground—that the pride must be tempered with practicality.  There are aspects of the past that we cannot “recover” or “rehabilitate.”  Through will, work and pride, we cannot elevate low-lying land and stop the winds from blowing.  And now we know that we cannot expect governments of the majority to care enough to preserve our past, or value our pride, or our history.

The fact that we were denied our rights to live securely is a point of pain.  That we built communities from that denial is a point of pride.  With Katrina, the painful root of that pride emerged; and it devastated so many of us.   

How many orchids can you grow in fetid soil?  We’ve managed many: Music, art, literature, forms of speech and worship so powerful that they’ve seduced the majority into imitation.  But there are limits.  We cannot cling desperately to lands earmarked for destruction by no less than nature—just because we were forced to do so in the past.

The cast of the film “Crash” appeared on a recent Oprah Winfrey show.  The discussion turned to the word “nigger.”  Winfrey said she found the word irredeemable.  Some of the black male cast members differed.  Some noted the distinction between the word “nigger” and the term “nigga,” the latter, they claimed, being a non-racist endearment. For centuries, whites used “nigger” to humiliate and utterly dehumanize us.  It suggested we were less than dogs in the speakers’ minds.  We weren’t people.  We were “niggers.”  Disposable.  Utilities.  Property.  Owned.  Chattel.  Since slavery, it has been used as a reminder—to insist that we’re still less than human.  The word still stinks of violence.  You hear it, and you’re ready to fight or flee.  It’s the inevitable soundtrack to a hate crime.

Hundreds of years ago, blacks so internalized the hatred and dehumanization under which we lived that we began calling each other “nigger.”  I remember hearing my father and his friends… “That nigger don’t know a goddamned thing about…”  “That nigger is so rich he doesn’t know what to do with his money.”  They might be discussing someone they loathed, or someone they admired, but either way, “nigger” could be attached.  The use of the word suggested a brotherhood—a brotherhood of the despised.  It suggested acceptance into the class of the accursed. 

I never understood the use of the word; I never used it.  I was raised in mainly white environments.  Only rarely lived in all-black ones.  I was never part of a large community of blacks for a long time and never felt myself someone worthy of reference—through brotherhood or hatred—as “nigger.”  That may be my loss.  It may be my gain.  But to me, the insistence that the word has been neutered because blacks use it with each other is absurd.  It still seems the tag of a community of the accursed.  That you accept that status, even speak of it with pride, does not elevate it.  “Nigga,” is “nigger.”  That white boys now use it with each other is just another piece of noble savage wannabe-ism—insiders toying with outsider poses, safe in the knowledge they will never suffer its consequences.  With “nigga,” again we desperately take the scraps we were given—ignoring the historical hatred from which they sprung—and try to mold them into a source of pride.  We took the low-lying land in New Orleans—forced to ignore the historical hatred from which access sprung—and fashioned from it a source of pride—for a while, until history, as it will when your pride lets you forget it, snatched the last word. 

In a yearlong review of levee work here, The Associated Press has tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood.

- Cain Burdeau, Associated Press, 8/23/08

 

 

After a couple of slave rebellions in the early 19th century, American Christianity shifted irrevocably from a catalyst for slave liberation, to an additional shackle securing black men in bondage to white ones.  After the Vesey and Prosser rebellions, whites largely oversaw slave worship to ensure that blacks were taught the value of submission and docility, the heavenly reward for those who suffered well, and the superiority of white men and women via fantastical biblical interpretations insisting that black skin was a curse from God.

The Jesus whom slaves were taught to worship was unquestionably white, as was God the Father who begat him.  Black slaves worshipped white Gods--Gods who looked like their masters.

Of course, in the popular modern American fantasy, American racial history began and ended with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  But down here in the reality-based community, history’s siren song still sounds strong and sickly sweet—if you’re willing to listen.

To swat at rumors that he’s a Muslim and alleviate fears of—and perhaps grab a vote or two from—white evangelicals, Barack Obama sat down with Megarich pastor, author and homophobe Rick Warren to woo evangelicals by saying things like, “I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him.”

This may be true.  But the man is a skilled politician, which means that the statement was also calculated to have maximum impact on the chosen audience.  He’s trying to slaughter several birds with one stone here, some of them beautiful and rare and deserving of life.  But in politics, sacrifices must be made.

He wants to assure white evangelicals and the 80% of white Americans who call themselves Christians, that he is like them, that he believes in their Jesus … that he obeys the rules of their Christianity.  And in doing so via standard Christian verbiage, he gets the bonus of implying that he is appropriately docile, humble, racially neutered, if you will—something very comforting to what I will euphemistically call “racially conservative” evangelicals.

Let’s get down to cases here:  The Godly figure most American Christians see when they invoke the name “Jesus” is a white man.  God’s son is white.  Thus, God is white.  God created man—white men—in his own image.  When a black man delivers his soul to the popular Jesus, he is also, in the popular mind, nodding a subtle assent to a central tenet of white supremacy—a white God. 

Jeremiah Wright was so reviled in part because if his “black liberation theology,” which worships a black Jesus.  In America, this is considered “radical.”  However, African Christians have long worshipped black images of Jesus, just as Asians have worshipped Asian images, etc.  Only here in America, where blacks live among a white majority and learned their catechism with a cleansing dose of white supremacy, is it considered “radical” for blacks to worship Gods that look like them.   

There is a reason that Evangelical Christianity and race hatred are so often joined at the hip.  In order to woo his large evangelical audience, Mike Huckabee rallied around the Confederate  flag in his 2008 Republican primary run.    In their book “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America,” Michael Emerson and Christian Smith wrote: 

Our argument is that evangelicals desire to end racial division and inequality, and attempt to think and act accordingly.  But, in the process, they likely do more to perpetuate the racial divide than they do to tear it down.  

In the post-civil rights era, the heavily evangelical south also became the solidly Republican south.  The Republican party has acknowledged its exploitation of race hatred to win political races and solidify its southern base.  Racist appeals won them votes, and it won them the longtime fealty of Evangelical Christians.

As Obama woos white evangelicals, he must prove to them that he shares their faith.  Part of their faith is a belief in a white Jesus and his white Father.  Obviously, Obama's own religious conversion under Jeremiah Wright emerged from an entirely different image of Christ.  But with Wright conveniently out of the way, it's a process of don't ask, don't tell.  If white evangelicals are stupid enough to believe that Obama prays to a white man, he's smart enough to let them.  He may also be white enough to avoid a really bad taste in his mouth for having done so.

 

My father was a career military officer, so pardon me if I don't genuflect at self-important, self-serving mentions of our "brave men and women in uniform," too often invoked by those who never served, or never knew anyone who did, or who fought like hell and worked every angle not to, and would riot in the streets if the US instituted a sensible draft that offered their rich, pampered little boys and girls the same opportunities to die and lose limbs with which we honor our all-volunteer force.

Being familiar with the military, I also feel no need to lionize everyone who's been in it. There are fools in uniform. The conduct of several of our recent wars proves that. There are also heroes, knaves, psychos, savants, mensches, thieves, rapists and every other type of man and woman you can name. Their motives for service can range from patriotism to political opportunism to desperation. Donning a uniform does not make them better people. It just makes them soldiers.

John McCain served in Vietnam. He was shot down, imprisoned and tortured. He endured a great deal, and a big hat-tip to him for coming out of it sane and strong enough to live a life. However, he does not get a pass on despicable hypocrisy, demented race-baiting, and outright lies because he served in Vietnam and suffered as a POW. To suggest that he should is to suggest that, likewise, Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson should get a pass on bribery and racketeering charges because he was raised black and poor in the racist south. Despicable behavior is just that. Your past does not excuse it.

I am violently sick of the media dancing around this increasingly dishonorable man's outrageous sense of entitlement with which he justifies his campaign's outright lies, half-truths and transparent obfuscations.

NPR's Renee Montagne began to ask McCain about his campaign tactics and he grouchily protested, "We're not sending any negative message in our campaign. We're drawing differences in positions between myself and Sen. Obama, which are significant."

Countering that statement, Montagne asked the McCain about the TV ad blaming Obama for high gas prices. McCain stuck to his non-sensical talking points:

I believe strongly that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And he voted for the energy bill that had all kind of tax breaks and giveaways for the oil companies. I believe if you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And it's a big problem in America today.

On the same day that statement aired, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lambasted McCain for failing to even to show up for a crucial vote on extending tax credits for solar and other energy efficient systems. Friedman wrote:

In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year -- which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn't leave his office to vote.

Yes, Senator Straight Talk, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem--and bald-faced hypocrisy is a problem.

McCain stated that he is "not sending any negative message" in his campaign. This is the same man who all but accused Obama of treason by stating, "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

If that's not negative, then I suppose it is equally "positive" to say that John McCain is willing to needlessly sacrifice American service men and women's lives in order to win the presidency. "

I am proud of the campaign I am running," McCain says.

Mitt Romney, official campaign surrogate and leading candidate for McCain's Vice President is heading the race-stained charge against Barack's patriotism and Americanness. He told Fox News that, "I think John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America."

McCain will ensure that America stays as white as Romney wants it to be. (He, of the church that has never actually repudiated the theological notion that black skin is the result of a curse from God; he who approached a black child wearing a necklace and said, "Oh, you've got some bling-bling here.")

Among McCain's most disgraceful lines of attack is the suggestion that dark-skinned Obama is somehow less American than the white-skinned. McCain savaged Michelle Obama for acknowledging the personal affects of America's racial history on black Americans. He trotted out his wife Cindy to mewl that she's always been proud of her country. Yes, and she's always been rich and white, too.

"I am not sending any negative message in this campaign," McCain says.

McCain has run the notorious "celebrity" ad linking Obama to two highly sexualized, blonde white women, conjuring the salacious historical distaste for black men who soil the purity of white American womanhood.

"I am proud of the campaign I am running," he says.

In response to Obama's suggestion that Americans should encourage children to learn more than one language, McCain surrogate Rudolph Guiliani stated, "this is why he's such a popular candidate in Europe; because there's such an anti-American feeling there... he's sort of capturing that."

There it is again: "Anti-American." McCain adviser Charlie Black stated, "We don't want to talk about his [Obama's] patriotism and character. We concede that he's a patriot and a person of good character."

Note the wording. He doesn't "believe." He "concedes." You only "concede" a debatable point. Even in this statement, the McCain camp opens the door for a vicious campaign using Obama's race to tar him as too "exotic," or "different," or "un-American," or just too damned black to be President.

"I am not sending any negative message in this campaign," McCain says. "I am proud of the campaign I am running."

Over 30 years ago, McCain served with honor. He shed that honor like a snake's spent skin somewhere between then and now. What's left is a dishonorable shell of a man, willing to pick the scab of this nation's oldest and most traumatic wound in order to win the high office to which he seems to feel he has a God-given right--so much so that he is justified in resorting to repellent tactics in order to win it.

John McCain is a dishonorable liar who once honorably wore a uniform. To hide his lies behind his medals dishonors not only the service he claims to prize--the one my father served all of his life--but also the country he seeks to lead.

At some point or another, every political campaign digs itself a hole, trips over its own feet and falls face-first into it.

In hyping its ‘learn who the VP is via text message’ stunt, the Obama camp has done just that.  

“No other campaign has done this before. You can be part of this important moment,” campaign manager David Plouffe breathlessly intones on the Obama for President site.  Yes, and no other campaign has announced by semiphore either.  

And even if the delivery method is not his point, even if he is touting a “you are there” sort of reality TV vibe, turning the VP selection process into an “American Idol” moment is not what you want to do when the press and opposition are accusing you of being all flash and no substance.

Fine, send a text message.  However, by overhyping the fact that you’re doing so, you mistakenly associate the campaign with a methodology that, in many average, middle-aged and older minds conjures visions of disposable teenage gossip and participatory TV voyeur-fests.  The logo imagery asking, “Who Will be Barack’s VP.  Be the First to Know,” sounds distressingly like a “21” TV promo or a political subplot teaser on a daytime soap.

By turning what should be a tactical afterthought into a mainstage event, the Obama campaign is playing to its own weaknesses.  Image is everything, and the whole point of McCain’s “celebrity” angle is to rob Obama of his presidential-seeming dignity.

Touting the VP selection with stunt casting trappings does their work for them.    

 

 

Dearest Diary, 

Just had a chat with Cheney.  God he’s freaky.  He said he was pushing me to McCain’s folks for VP.  Somehow he made it sound… scary, like he’d pack me off to Gitmo if I didn’t get picked.  “It’s yours to lose,” he said, glowering.  Something’s wrong with that guy.  His face doesn’t work right.  I don’t think it smiles.  I wonder if he has teeth.  Prob’ly just fangs.  Brrrrr!

But he made his point. I better get it.  Trying to think if there’s anything else I could do.  I put out the statement, “I would be honored, blah blah blah.”  Hit all the right patriotic notes.  Rove supports me; Bush supports me; now even Cheney.  All they have to do is convince that whiny old midget.

Scratch that diary.  That’s wrong.  He’s a hero.  War hero.  Prisoner of war.   Yes.  He’s a whiny hero midget.  Hee hee.  Stop it, Mittens!  I even tell my kids Biff, Scooter, Boomer, Beav, Chip, Ralph, Jethro, Tommy, Rex, Hootie, and Ebeneezer… 1,2,3,4… whatever…  I tell ‘em what a hero he is so that they’ll tell everyone that I tell ‘em what a hero he is and he’ll think I think he’s not a whiny old midget.

It’s not my fault there wasn’t a war for me to fight in.  OK, there was.  It’s not my fault I had the connections to get out of fighting it.  I was doing the Lord’s work converting the French to the true religion.  Just think: if there’d been more like me, we wouldn’t have to call them “freedom fries,” now would we?  Think, people!

And the gall they had to criticize my kids for not going to Iraq!  As if!  They serve their country.  They’re role models.  Handsome boys.  Morally upstanding.  Working to get me elected does more for America than anything they’d do in uniform.  Even naked as cherubs (and they do love to roughhouse au naturelle) they inspire!

Their service is equal to any soldier’s because I have something unique to offer America.  I still have that twinkle in my eye.  It's wasted on the private sector.  Retire my ass. This face was made for the cameras.  This smile was made to sway the masses.

This underwear rides up like a mother….  Couldn’t come up with something reasonable like a frackin’ Burka…

I don’t know what more they want.  Conservative conshmervative.  I proved I’d hate whoever they wanted me to hate to win this thing.  I more than made up for being the governer of the most liberal state in the union.  They wanted fag bashing.  I’ll gave ‘em fag bashing.   They hate Mexicans; I supported a frackin’ national moat.  I did everything but sing Deutscheland über alles in a Klan hood while desecrating an image of the prophet Muhammed over the smoking ruins of an abortion clinic with my right hand on Ann Coulter’s left tit.

What do they care what I did yesterday.  It’s what I say I’ll do tomorrow that counts.  On that, McCain and I agree, and I tell you, there’s been less substantial grounds for political marriage. Wow!  Brainstorm!  

What do they care what I did yesterday. It’s what I say I’ll do tomorrow that counts.

That would make the best McCain/Romney campaign slogan ever! 

See what I’d bring to the table?  I’d be a great VP.  I know I would.  What was it Chris Matthews said…

He has the perfect chin, the perfect hair, he looks right. He looks like a Mountie. He looks like he’s from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

And Roger Simon? 

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

Fags.  Heh heh.

He must see that I’d look great next to a casket.  State funerals.  I could do that.  It’s the smile, I tell ya’.   Oozes empathy.  I’d do a great disaster.   If I’d been vice President, those Katrina folks would have thought that shit-stained superdome was a 3 star hotel.  They would have downright forgot they were black.  I would’ve smiled sympathetically, with just the right note of condescension so they’d appreciate that someone of my stature took the time to care.  How flattered they would have been.  Like America itself smiling down on them.  That would have meant so much.  I would’ve donned an apron while I humbly served them a meal.  Maybe a dish called, “Curse of Ham...” Ha ha ha ha ha.

“Who let the dogs out. Woof Woof.”  Oh, black people are funny. 

Speaking of dogs. I think that goddamned Irish setter lost me the primary.  They made fun of me cause I strapped it to the roof of the car on a family trip and it shat down the back window on the way down the interstate.   I should’ve rigged a crap screen, that’s all.  I hate dogs. PETA freaks.  What part of “dominion over… the earth” do they NOT understand?  Next time I’ll strap the mangy bastard to the bumper and see how they like it.

Ouch!  10% of my millions and half the day with my hand up my ass, I swear…

Have to make some news.  Reinforce my credentials.  I need to attack somebody--call ‘em treasonous, heathen, anti-American, terrorist-sympathizing, Muslim, French smelling, radical elitists.  But who?  Who?

Oh my God, this conservatism thing is hard work.

Everybody considers Obama through the self-reflective prism of his blackness while pretending to ignore the fact that Obama is black. White Democratic primary voters made all manner of unsupported assumptions about Obama based largely on his skin. There was absolutely no indication that he was a progressive true believer. In fact, in May, 2007, <em>The New Yorker</em> ran an <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar">in-depth Obama profile</a> entitled "The Conciliator." His background and actions suggested a highly pragmatic, malleable politician. Voting for him, primary supporters made a statement about themselves (see <em>Salon</em> magazine's <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/02/26/obama/">"It's okay to vote for Obama because he's black"</a>), and made assumptions based on the "black saint/black radical" historical narrative, assuming that this decidedly centrist politician was going to somehow "heal the divisions" in America (for the first time in its history) and/or usher in a radically progressive renaissance. Blacks, seeing his skin and appreciating his adoption of black culture, ignored his actual distance from it. A white mother and an African father means he formatively absorbed none of the cultural heritage of American descendants of African slaves. But overwhelmed by the historical first, and being ourselves largely blind to our own cultural distinction, we rallied behind a candidate choice George Will properly identified as "eccentric." Neither blacks nor whites can overtly mention his race save to highlight his "first" status. Blacks can't because doing so would "raise the topic" and if it's a topic, he loses. Raising it is tantamount to a race crime. White conservatives can't mention it because their entire modern association with race has been to exploit suspicion and hatred for electoral success. White progressives can't mention it outside a very narrow perimeter because if they do, they're accused of racism, as Bill Clinton was for comparing Obama's vote totals to those of another black candidate in a state with a large black voting bloc. We must all pretend to believe that race isn't there. <em>The Washington Post</em> quoted John McCain as saying "He brought up the issue of race; I responded to it. I don't want that issue to be part of this campaign. I'm ready to move on. And I think we should move on." He retreats behind the playground retort, "I didn't start it. He did!" But McCain's statement acknowledges that the issue exists. He refers to it as "that issue." He just doesn't want to be seen addressing it directly. However, he is more than willing to address it indirectly by insisting that his opponent has addressed it by simply acknowledging his own blackness. Very clever. Race is an issue in this campaign. Whether or not Americans are willing to see a black man--even a half-white one with no inherent ties to America's racist crimes--occupy the highest office in the land is the issue that dare not speak its name: What do some Americans fear about a black man in the Oval Office? Do they fear he will seek revenge for historical crimes against blacks? Do they fear he will be too strong an advocate for black Americans? Do they feel he will give short shrift to white Americans? Do they fear that he will simply remind them of the bulk of this nation's history that they'd rather forget? Are racist impulses still strong enough that many simply fear or hate the idea of a black man with power over them? These are the unasked questions. To ask them would unleash America's demons, the snarling beasts we've locked in a cage in the basement, whose diminished, yet still menacing growls we pretend not to hear. If race, its place in American history and the American present are all unwelcome topics, it only stands to reason that the people at whom the word "race" is most often focused--Afro-Americans--are equally objectionable. We are, after all, the reason that the caged beast exists. Our very skin is the source of all of that discomfort. On Tuesday, July 29, the House of Representatives quietly passed a non-binding resolution apologizing to African Americans for the crimes of slavery and the Jim Crow laws that stood until 1965. It was the first time the Federal government had apologized for those crimes of the distant and recent past. Oddly, it was not big news; no front page status. Stories that appeared highlighted fears that an apology would bolster calls for reparations, that most discomfiting topic. <em>The New York Times</em> recently reported that even doctors, the stalwarts of the "deny and defend" strategy, are learning that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/us/18apology.html?_r=1&ref=health&oref=slogin">earnest apologies dilute the anger that fuels expensive lawsuits</a>. The most maddening thing to the injured is the insistence that they were not wronged, when the facts state otherwise. When they know in their hearts and souls--when they hear in the voices of their parents and grandparents--the pain and humiliation, the results we all still live with, such denials gall. To deny the injury is to deny the wronged--to deny their rights, their value, their very humanity. It's a re-perpetration of the original crime in schematic. Until Americans realize that if we take pride in America's greatness, we must also take responsibility for her crimes, we will continue to lie to each other and to ourselves about what we see in black skin. We will continue to inwardly cringe at its associations and wish that it, and therefore its wearers, would simply fade away. We will continue our vain attempts to emotionally disappear 12% of our population and the vast majority of our history. And we will do so with all the grace and dignity of John McCain's Britney/Paris TV spot.

I guess the Uppity One on a World Tour was just too much for their lily-white hearts. There are, after all, rules. In the Willa Cather world the Washington press corps inhabit, decorum is life. Birth and breeding will out. George Bush has the sense and sensibility of a trailer park whore, but he's got Barbara's genes and a political pedigree -- like an expensive dog. John McCain makes George Bush look like the cover boy for the Journal of the Mind, but he was a Soldier who shows the press proper deference and never suggests that he's brighter than they are. They love him in return. The Los Angeles Times highlighted a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University showing that, "ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign." It's not just the networks. The press pack has turned. The unfortunate Maureen Dowd provides a rambling column of nitpicking negatives that ends by repeating the narrative that Obama should be winning by a landslide, and since he is not, needs all the help he can get. She points a finger because he does not personally pick out the trinkets he brings to his daughters from the road. Hearing that he saw his daughter perform in a play of The Odyssey, she writes: "I wonder if that rang any bells on this trip." Get it? Heroes? Thank God he didn't see her in a kiddie Mamma Mia. Dowd would have spouted Abba lyrics at him, pregnant with significance. His greatest sin per Dowd? Reckless displays of intellect unbecoming a black man. She writes: " The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a Berlin restaurant as he sipped a rare "very dry" martini with olives." "Briefing books," she sniffs, as if to suggest 'only the little people need to know what they're talking about. The Elect just say it (whatever it may be) with natural authority and that's enough.' And then of course, the dig about not sufficiently kissing her ass, the "rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse..." She goes on: "The Obamanauts were so elated [with the overseas trip] that they didn't even seem to mind the caricature of Obama, ears sticking out, that had been drawn on the round We-Are-The-World Obama logo in the press section. The cartoon candidate demanded: 'Worship me.'" The press is now drawing horns and a mustache on his image. Then one of them is stupid enough to admit it in print. And they wonder why we think they're adolescent, self-righteous fools. Dana Milbank goes Dowd one better. He takes the word "Presumptuous," -- today's euphemism for "Uppity Nigger" and slings it with a malicious abandon you'd expect from a bunker-based, confederate-flag draped Red State commenter. "Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee," he writes.

He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing.

Note the construction: Obama "granted an audience"... as opposed to the Pakistani prime minister agreeing to meet with him. "Had his staff arrange" for a briefing. In other words, he had "the help" do it when we all know that he should be "the help." Milbank continues, "Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally." Of the same House Democratic "pep rally," Maureen Dowd wrote:

Some said his reception was not as enthusiastic as the one Hillary got when she returned from her odyssey. The room warmed to him, mainly because he told the lawmakers how much he'd need them to get policies passed if he gets elected.

Same event, opposite takes. Both equally devoid of verifiable fact. Both equally negative. Milbank then blames Obama for his travel style: 

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president's. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities.

Obama should obviously ignore the security precautions of the Secret Service and hop a bus. In both Milbank and Dowd, there is the hint of the personal affront. Both their tones suggest that the American political Marquis of Queensbury rules are being broken and both appoint themselves the Keepers of Sacred Tradition. It was the same with the Clintons. They just weren't "one of us." Might there be another Barbarian at the gate? Or, to paraphrase a character from the 1972 film, The Man, Rod Serling's take on the first black president: 'There may be a jigaboo in the White House.' Obama is behaving the way any other over-achieving black man behaves (who has not risen due to the condescension of white benefactors). He is preparing ad nauseum for any event, and out-doing his competition at every turn. He is the smartest guy in the room. He displays the results of his brains and preparation. Attack him for any direct quote or action that suggests he buys his own hype. That's only fair. However, he's now being attacked for doing a better, and more thorough job of running for president than anyone in recent political memory. He's being attacked for being good at his given task. I once had a white boss in an all-white workplace literally sit me down in his office and say. "You're a very bright guy." "Thank you," I said. He paused for too long. Then he said. "You should try to be..." he paused again, obviously uncomfortable, "... a little less. You know what I mean?" Yes. I knew what he meant.