TNC Does It Again

Maureen Dowd wrote a bullshit column ostensibly hitting President Obama and his team for not being "black enough" because of the administration's response to the Shirley Sherrod episode which got a lot more play than it should have earlier this week. It seems as if people don't realize that its her shtick to bring down Democratic Presidents by questioning their manhood in any way possible. This "he's not black enough" trash has been a drum she's been beating for quite some time and the Shirley Sherrod incident just gave her another opportunity. And if you notice not once in that long ass bunch of bloviating did she ever take the time to even mention FoxNews or Andrew Breitbart, as if the doctored video of Sherrod shut appeared one day out of thin air.

Ta Nehisi Coates on the other hand wrote a post about the reality of the situation as it stands. As he says of people who keep calling for a national conversation on race, "talk is cheap"!

Expecting an American conversation on race in this country, is like expecting financial advice from someone who prefers to not check their bank balance. It's not that the answers, themselves, are pre-ordained, its that we are more interested in questions than answers, in verdicts than evidence. Even now, there are people who insist--in spite of the actual video--that the NAACP audience is actually cheering for Sherrod to not help the white farmer.




Put bluntly, this is a country too ignorant of itself to grapple with race in any serious way. The very nomenclature--"conversation on race"--betrays the unseriousness of the thing by communicating the sense that race can be boxed from the broader American narrative, that you can somehow talk about Thomas Jefferson without Sally Hemmings; that you can discuss Andrew Jackson without discussing his betrayal of the black artillerymen who fought at the Battle of New Orleans; that you can discuss the suffrage without Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells or Frederick Douglass; that you can discuss temperance without understanding the support of the Klan; that you can discuss the path to statehood in Florida without discussing Fort Gadsen; that you can talk Texas without understanding cotton, and so on.




It's not so much that we don't know--it's that we aspire to not know. The ignorance of the African-American thread in the broader American quilt--the essential nature of that thread--is willful, and the greatest evidence that the spirit of white supremacy walks with us. There was a lot of self-congratulation around the justice done on Shirley Sherrod. It's premature. The thing will happen again. Race isn't a "distraction" from Obama's agenda--it's the compromised, unsure ground upon which this country walks everyday. It is the monster, and it will not be evaded writing Shirley Sherrod off to the machinations of the 24-hour news cycle.

What's most irritating is the same mainstream media folks who keep calling for this mythical national conversation on race, are the same people who as soon as the word racism or racist enter the discussion will bend over backwards to defend the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan lest they be criticized by right wingers. What they really want is a national lie about where we are as a country on race to make everyone feel better.

Sorry folks, that's just not going to happen.

Schooling Tweety (And Others)

Last night after President Obama's State Of The Union address, Chris Matthews had this to say on MSNBC,



I had a lot of things I wanted to say about how ignorant the comment of his was about forgetting President Obama was black for an hour was, but then I happened upon TNC's post on it and felt like his response said most of what I wanted to say.

One way to think about this is to flip the frame. Around these parts, we've been known, from time to time, to chat about the NFL. We've also been known to chat about the intricacies of beer. If you hang around you'll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, "Wow, I forgot you were a woman." Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.

The problems is three-fold. First, it takes my necessarily limited, and necessarily blinkered, experience with the fairer sex and builds it into a shibboleth of invented truth. Then it takes that invented truth as a fair standard by which I can measure one's "woman-ness." So if football and beer don't fit into my standard, I stop seeing the person as a woman. Finally instead of admitting that my invented truth is the problem, I put the onus on the woman. Hence the claim "I forgot you were a woman," as opposed to "I just realized my invented truth was wrong."

Ditto for Chris Matthews. The "I forgot Obama was black" sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance--you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don't know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn't forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white.

To that I will just add this, I don't think Tweety in his whole life has or would say he forgot a white person was white when he was speaking to them and really that goes to the bullshit standard floating around about who "real Americans" are. The comment he made really could have come out of the mouth of Pat Buchannan because it had just the same kind of racial overtones. You see in order to make that statement, what you really have to believe is that it is the rare black person who can speak for the rest of America. That black people are somehow inherently predisposessed to only speak for other black people for the most part. And that all the abitions that we have and reach for are uniquely black and foreign to white Americans. That is patently absurd.

Until "good white people" like Chris Matthews, who really probably thought he was proffering a compliment, come to understand that WE are "real Americans" too, this is the kind of bullshit you can expect to slip out from time to time throughout President Obama's time and office, and even worse the mindset that will prevail even if not spoken outwardly.

So please Tweety, try not to do us any more favors, ok....

The Illest

I have mentioned before that the reason why I ever started up my own blog was because while hanging over at Ta Nehisi Coates' spot he pretty much challenged all of the regular commenters to branch out and do our own thing and let our voices be heard. Considering how much fun I had leaving comments there and other places around the net I eventually took up that challenge. But I still make sure to go by and check out his offerings everyday whether I offer an opinion in comments or not. The reason being is the dude is a dope ass writer in every sense of the word. And he writes in a voice that speaks to me . No matter how much I put into this blog I am pretty sure I could never reach the kind of status he enjoys because the boy has some God given talent that you just don't come by every day.

Having said that this particular post still blew me away. Not just on the knowledge dropped but in how he put it in almost a poetic commentary. 100% Awesome sauce. When I run up on something this major I don't usually excerpt it and I won't this time because it deserves the full read. So go check out "In Every Black Man's Eyes--Death To The Rebel", you will be glad you did!

Jive Turkeys

The other day I watched this youtube video of Michael Eric Dyson and got more pissed off than I have been in a while at a pundit. It was frustrating as hell to see this guy tossing around 3 dollar words to try to make himself seem credible when really he was talking a whole bunch of nothing. Ta Nehisi Coates eviscerated that fool yesterday in a much more eloquent way than I could muster. And today Melissa Harris-Lacewell went all in on Dyson, Tavis Smiley, Cornel West and Dick Gregory who put out some quasi documentary called "Stand". Once again if it was me I would have probably just called them a bunch of race hustlers trying to get rich on the backs of black folks doing little to nothing to actually help them in their every day lives. But Ms Harris-Lacewell put it in much better terms and stuck the dagger in hard.

But this appropriation misrepresents rather than preserves King's legacy. King was a powerful questioner and, at times, ally of President Johnson because he was at the helm of a massive social movement of men and women who were shut out of the ordinary political process. It was not King's intellectual capacity or verbal dexterity that made him an effective advocate for racial issues; it was his own accountability to that movement.

This is not true of Smiley and his "soul patrol," who are mostly public personalities and tenured professors largely unaccountable to the black constituency. King's meager income, though supplemented by the lecture circuit, was grounded in the voluntary contributions of black churchgoers.

Smiley is backed by powerful corporations, like Wal-Mart and Nationwide, that have troubled relationships with these communities. The college profs on the bus are comfortably supported by well-endowed universities. This does not invalidate their views on race, but it does make the analogy with King a poor fit.

Further, Smiley and his "soul patrol" seemed to have missed the intervening 40 years between the era of King and the election of Obama. African-Americans are no longer fully disfranchised subjects of an oppressive state.

African-Americans are now citizens capable of running for office, holding officials accountable through democratic elections, publicly expressing divergent political preferences and, most importantly, engaging the full spectrum of American political issues, not only narrowly racial ones. The era of racial brokerage politics, when the voices of a few men stood in for the entire race, is now over. And thank goodness it is over. Black politics is growing up.

The men of "Stand" yearned for an imagined racial past. By their accounting, this racial past had better music, more charismatic leaders and a more-involved black church.

Their romanticism ignores the cultural contributions of contemporary black youth, forgets the dangerous limitations of charismatic leadership and revises the fraught, complicated relationship of black churches to struggles for racial equality. And these men ignored the democratizing effect of new media forms, which revolutionized the 2008 election.

Black people were not duped by some slick, media-generated candidate. African-Americans were co-authors of the Obama campaign. Through social networks, YouTube videos, political blogs and new-media echo chambers, black people were equal partners in shaping the candidate and his campaign. There was no need for the entrenched pundit class to tell black voters what to think or how to behave; they figured it out for themselves.

Still, there is plenty to criticize in the young Obama administration: the refusal to prosecute those implicated in the torture memos, civilian casualties caused by drone attacks, bank bailouts and inadequate defense of gay rights to name a few. But black communities are already engaged in these critiques and many others. Black local organizers, elected officials, bloggers, pundits and columnists have taken substantive, specific positions on a broad range of issues.

In black communities, nonprofit organizations continue to work for justice, and charities still try to fill the gap during tough economic times. African-Americans are engaged as mature citizens ought to be: in both discourse and action.

This political maturity is precisely the source of the black public intellectual crisis: What do Smiley and the Soul Patrol add to this process? Their bus never stopped at a Habitat for Humanity site to build a home or at a soup kitchen to serve the hungry. Their dialogue centered more on the relative merits of Aretha vs. Beyonce than on meaningful political issues.

Though they spoke with elders, their self-congratulatory revelry never paused to engage any elected officials, issues specialists or local activists. And while they talked a great deal about women, they never spoke to a woman.

"Stand" was sad because I still believe in a role for black public intellectuals. Scholars and journalists often have a particular capacity for curiosity, questioning and issue synthesis that has real value in public discourse. It was painfully clear that this particular accountability crusade is not informed by any of those skills. Instead, it seems determined to stand in the way of the maturation of African-American politics in order to maintain personal power.

My hope is that some day soon we can push these carnival barkers from the stage as "voices of the black community". We need new and better advocates for us who care about more than book sales and speakers fees. Who is ready to step up to the plate?

Even More Context Needed

Cross posted at Attackerman


Ta Nehisi Coates has a post up about Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor and one of the supposed controversial statements that she made in a speech she gave in 2001 to some students at the University of Californa Berkley School of Law. Here is an excerpt:

Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

I think we can immediately dispense with the crazies who think this statement should disqualify Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. It's worth noting that William Rehnquist once endorsed segregation, and yet rose to be Chief Justice of the court.

That said, I think Sotomayor's statement is quite wrong. I understand the basis of it, laid out pretty well by Kerry Howley over at Hit & Run. The idea is that Latinos have a dual experience that whites don't have and that, all things being equal, they'll be able to pull from that experience and see things that whites don't. The problem with this reasoning is it implicitly accepts the logic (made for years by white racists) that there is something essential and unifying running through all white people, everywhere. But White--as we know it--is a word so big that, as a descriptor of experience, it almost doesn't exist.

Indeed, it's claims are preposterous. It seeks to lump the miner in Eastern Kentucky, the Upper West Side Jew, the yuppie in Seattle, the Irish Catholic in South Boston, the hipster in Brooklyn, the Cuban-American in Florida, or even the Mexican-American in California all together, and erase the richness of their experience, by marking the bag "White." This is a lie--and another example of how a frame invented (and for decades endorsed) by whites is, at the end of the day, bad for whites. White racism, in this country, was invented to erase the humanity and individuality of blacks. But for it to work it must, necessarily, erase the humanity of whites, too.

Sotomayor, unwittingly, buys into that logic by conjuring the strawman of "a white male." But, in the context that she's discussing, no such person exists. What is true of the straight Polish-American in Chicago, may not be true for the white gay dude working in D.C. I'm not even convinced that what is true for the white dude in West Texas, is true for the white dude in Austin--or that what's true of the white dude in Austin, is true of other white dudes in Austin. There's just too much variation among people to make such a broad statement about millions of people.

After having reread the speech I have to say that this is one of the rare times that I totally disagree with Coates. My disagreement really isn't on the substance of his argument per se, but on the premiss of the argument itself. Here is my response as published in a comment on his blog:

I actually think even more context is needed and a focus on the words Judge Sotomayor actually said.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

What I believe Sotomayor to be saying here isn't about painting with a broad brush that encompasses "all white men". I believe she is making a point about white men who do not have a lot of experience dealing with women and minorities on a personal level. To me the key to understanding what she is saying is when she points out that there is no universal standard for what "wise" is or isn't. Many people consider a person who is wise to denote academic achievments alone. I believe that in the totality of her speech she is making the case that wisdom also comes from personal experience. She made the case pretty clearly earlier in the speech that there have been studies that show that women and minorities as judges rule differently than their white male counterparts on the whole. And even in what I quoted she points out that all male courts did not vote against sexual or racial discrimination until 1972 yet they were seen as "wise men".

Now for me its hard to see how anyone can say that this is an absolutist statement especially when she makes allowances that it isn't. Let me quote it again to reiterate.

I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable.

What she is saying is that on the other hand there are also many "wise white men" who do NOT have the capacity for understanding the values and needs of minorities and women for a variety of reasons that she lays out, that a woman who is also minority and has had a wealth of experience with other minorities and women wouldn't be hindered by when judging cases.

And if the problem ISN'T that she is pigeon holing every white man then are we REALLY going to argue against decades of precedent that shows that white men have on the Supreme Court have in fact affirmed that discrimination based on race or sex or sexuality was in fact perfectly fine under the constitution?

Dropping Knowledge

In a post that ends with an ancedote about Joe The Plumber's most recent idiotic comments, Ta Nehisi Coates connects all the dots about how politicians use racism and bigotry to condition their constituents into what he terms lazy thinking. The post brings the AWESOME and you need to check it out, but I am just going to hit you with the part on JTP.

So much of this is so perfect--including the idea that "honkey" is the worst slur Joe can think of. But his attitude toward not letting "queers" around his children, is oddly reminiscent. Much as the racist demagouges of yore convinced themselves that highest aim of black maledom was to bed their fugly-ass daughters, Joe the Plumber is convinced that the highest aim of all queerdom is to spend some time with his snotty-nosed brats.

He's indicative of a demographic that has long been ill-served by its leadership. That works out well for the leadership--at least initially. But over the long-term, the trouble with ignorance is that it trades the "now" for the future. You're betting that those who come after you won't wise up. How's that working out?

Now go on and check out the whole thing.

TNC Breaks It Down

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great post up on his blog expounding on why he is a liberal/Democrat. The whole thing is worth the read but I wanted to excerpt just a piece and then I will follow up on his points.

I keep thinking about the big things that have always kept me from being a conservative--the knee-jerk worship of a past that branded me half a man, the elevation of the loud imbeciles who think science teachers should be using the Bible, the toleration and baiting of bigots who cloaked themselves in the garb of "States Rights," and now run under the garb of "protecting marriage." The common demonator here is an unreflective veneration of what was, a belief that tradition, no matter how backwards, can heal all. Thus it's only right, that Steele, Gingrich and Limbaugh make up the leadership.

It's not that I think liberals are without flaw, but to argue that our most strident members should be our public face, would seem silly. As Ross intimates, if most liberals thought it was good idea for Howard Zinn Randall Robinson, or Noam Chomsky to be a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, I'd think we'd all gone insane. If Democratic politicians were scared to disagree with Keith Olberman or Michael Moore, I'd be a man without a home.

But these guys think that they are America. They delude themselves with that "center-right nation" analysis, and then mask their losses by claiming they didn't really lose. They think the problem is their wardrobe, their slang, their hairstyle. This what black folks call Project-Bougie or--more aptly put--just plain trifling. The GOP is out shopping for a new dining set, a new couch, a flat-screen--anything to make the crib look a little more inviting. Meanwhile the water bill is two months past due. The lights are off. And the eviction notice is in the mail.

This is without a doubt the position of many if not most black people in this country when it comes to picking a political party. Republicans don't seem to understand that harking back to their good old days were bad old days for most of us. They do it so much that you can't help but feel like they think the old way of doing things is preferrable to what we have now. Maybe in their world thats true, but us minorities generally feel like having the right to vote, not being discriminated against in the work place and being able to dine where we want to are some advances that we would rather keep. Its also apparent now with the Rush Limbaugh two step they are doing that the Republican leadership has absolutely no back bone and not a hint of any courage. Now to the last point, and maybe the most important, these days Republicans just don't get that they are talking at us instead of to us. While they are screaming about earmarks and deficits, real people are struggling every single day and we don't hear a thing out of their camp explaining how what they want to do will help us right now. Unless and until the Republican Party gets their collective heads out of their asses and realize that preaching to their base is going to continue their downfall they have absolutely no chance of returning from the wilderness. I am not in the business of giving them advice but I do believe that just having one viable political party in this country is asking for trouble. At some point someone in the GOP is going to have to open their eyes and recognize that yesterday is gone and that its time to start living in today.

That's Whats Up

As you may know from reading my blog, I am a frequent commenter over at Ta-Nehisi Coates' spot. The reason being is that the guy does a helluva job running his shop and his writing is straight bananas. Well evidently I wasn't the only one paying attention as he has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award for his book "The Beautiful Struggle". Show the brother some love and go out and cop that joint. And if you get the time stop by his blog and give him a shout out. He definitely deserves it.

"Racial Epithets, Why Does It Always Come Down To That?"

I was reminded of this clip from "Be Cool" after I read T Coates' rant (in jest) over one of his white commenters trying to claim the electric slide as being "whitest thing you could do."

Yeah sure, steal from us and then lie about who you stole it from. Fuckers. This reminds of that scene in Back To The Future, where Michael J. Fox "teaches" Chuck Berry how to play the guitar. Or like people coming here to tell me that there was nothing "black" about the fist-bump. Damn right there's nothing black about the "fist-bump"--we don't invent slang that sounds like it looks. It's called dap, motherfuckers. A pound, if you must. Ya'll got me calling that shit a "fist-bump."

Classic

Wolverine: Origins

I was reminded when I went by Ta Nehisi Coates' spot about seeing the trailer for the new Wolverine movie last night. When it ended the crowd in the theater went wild and wanted more. As a long time comic books fan in general and X Men in particular fan I cissed about the big screen trilogy but not so much about Hugh Jackman as the Wolverine. I always thought Mel Gibson would have been a better choice for some reason but thats neither here nor there. Point blank, after seeing this trailer I have jumped aboard the Jackman bandwagon and I can't wait to shell out some dollars to watch this flick.


X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE HD

From The "Karma Is a Mofo" Department

What a difference a week makes.

On a lighter note, I don't want to hear a single Giant fan out there ever call TO a team-killer. You guys have lost all right to talk.

Sports and glass houses NEVER go together.


How bout dem Cowboys!