"An inadequate black male..."

Obama leaves Trinity

The sexism that is Ta-Nehisi

Black Power

Dispatches from the hinterlands

On a much more serious note

Guess who's back...

Today And Tomorrow

Is The Criminal Justice System Racist?

The Chronicles Of Epic Fail: The Clinton Henchmen Edition

The Logic Of "I Ain't No Punk"

Kathy vs. Webb

Stepping away from all that high-minded rhetoric, I'll add that, in practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I'm not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I'm not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.

But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn't win. But for Obama to choose -- out of all the well-qualified candidates out there -- the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big "screw you" to Hillary's supporters and to feminists in general.

How would Obama supporters feel if their man lost a closely contested fight, and then Hillary turned around and picked as veep someone who, into the 1990s, was an outspoken critic of civil rights? It would seem tone-deaf and incredibly insensitive, to say the least.

Hill Up In Harlem

Sorry, More On Hitchens And Michelle

Yo New York: Ta-Nehisi Live

The Michelle Obama "Whitey" Video

Managing My Blogroll

The Gaffe-Obsessed Press

Veepstakes Continued

Jim Webb's Sexist Past

In the Washingtonian magazine article, "Women Can't Fight," the ex-Marine Webb wrote of the brutal conditions during the Vietnam War and argued against letting women into combat...Webb described one of the academy's coed dorms as "a horny woman's dream" and said that he had never met a woman he "would trust to provide . . . combat leadership."

Kobe And Jackass

Veepstakes Blogging

Because, you know, I'm an elitist

I have to confess- I am celebrating Hillary’s implosion today. I went out earlier and had two glasses of wine, a spectacular grilled romaine salad with avocado and a raspberry vinagrette, and then a splendidly rare filet mignon in an oyster demi-glaze on a bed of asparagus. Because, you know, I am an elitist. And then I had a fat cigar. A few months back I was defending her, and was ready to vote for her, even after years as a Republican. And then I watched her campaign and I realized once again how repellent she is.

Yeah, I really wish I could be more graceful about this, but since dinner, I have had a couple more drinks and I keep getting more ecstatic. In my defense, you know what you get when you come here, so deal with it. All praise the Giant Spaghetti Monster, please give us another pervert Republican this weekend and the week will be complete.

Is Barack Obama A Muslim?

Class

About That Assasination Remark

Nice Little Campaign You Got Here. Be A Shame If Something Happened...

Don't Do It

In states like Missouri, coolness toward Hillary Clinton puts many Democrats in an uncomfortable position. Harold Ford, Jr., is close to both Clintons. He is running a strong race in Tennessee—if he wins, he would be the first popularly elected African-American senator from the South. When I asked Ford if Hillary Clinton would be campaigning with him, he said, “I’m not running away from her position on the war or her position on energy independence. I’m doing events with her.” When I asked him where, he said, “In Washington.”

Some Democrats fear any association with national Democrats, who are perceived to be too liberal. “I had this notion that I could convince people who were skeptical of national Democrats to vote for me because I could bring home the bacon, or because I could find some personal pitch to them,” Brad Carson, the former Oklahoma congressman, said. “But it was very hard for people to separate me out from Hillary Clinton. All their ads were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and me. They said I was more liberal than these guys, and that if I went to Washington I’d be supporting their agenda. I found that extremely difficult to overcome.”

Across Missouri, I heard similar fears. At a breakfast fund-raiser for McCaskill in Kansas City, Katheryn J. Shields, a Democrat who is the chief executive of Jackson County, which encompasses Kansas City, said of Hillary Clinton, “She’s great.” But when asked if Clinton should be the Party’s nominee, Shields said, “That would be a hard one.” The outgoing executive director of the Greene County Democrats, Nora Walcott, was more direct. Though she said she was to the left in the Party, she feared that Clinton’s liberal credentials would alienate Missouri voters. “You’ve got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary,” she told me. “It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party.” Clinton’s obvious shifts to the center frustrate Walcott on two counts, she said: “I disagree with the way she’s going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it’s not working. People don’t believe she’s a moderate.”

Props To McCain

A Post For Fools Who Mistake Thier Limited Knowledge For ALL Knowledge

Jewish Racism

Continue reading "Jewish Racism" »

Keep Digging Geraldine

Especially The Racists And The Antisemites

"Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust. "Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Strange Bedfellows: Blacks And Applachian Whites

Jim Webb: Endorsed By Ta-Nehisi (Like It Matters)

How To Deal With Police Brutality

Four police officers who were caught on video beating three suspects in a drug-related triple shooting will be fired, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said Monday.
Three other officers have been suspended, Commissioner Ramsey said at a news conference, and one officer has been demoted.

Then You See Something Like This...

And now for some reconcilliation

...I saw Obama's speech as trying to bridge that divide--to say, as someone who had one foot in each community, "This is why the way they do things you don't like--not because they're different, but because they're very much like you." To be sure, he did it in a hamfisted way. But the grandmother example was, I thought, less an attempt to throw Grandma under the bus then to say that "racism is not the same thing as being an evil person". I'd venture to say that most white people know at least one older person who is both an extremely good, moral and virtuous person, and a racist. When it is a grandmother, a beloved teacher, a longtime employer, or a friend's parent, we discount their unacceptable beliefs, because we have personal proof of their general goodness. Thus we come to understand that good people can have very bad ideas. I think it was perfectly fair of Obama to extend that same charity to Reverend Wright.

What I love so much about Megan's post is that it rejects ideology and offers some humanity to this whole debate over this whole "state of racism" business. It's a great post. By all means check it out.

For Racists Who Like Telling People Who They Are Racist Against That Racism Is Dead

Depressing...

I'm trying to be optimistic about this and stick with my standard, "we are the future" line. Very difficult when you read things like this:

Later, when asked if she thinks this campaign has been racist, she says she does not. And she circles back to the sexism. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."

This is the same woman who, only a week ago, equated "white" with "hard-working," whose surrogate claimed that Obama would not be in the race if he weren't black. When I read things like that, it brings forth some really dark thoughts about race in this country, and how black people should proceed. This is the case for Malcolm X and Jeremiah Wright, the case for a complete blindness to a nation of black men toiling in prisons, to black girls growing up fatherless. This is the case against Barack Obama--that his compassion for people who step on his wife and kids for power, is in fact a compromise of black people. I know that this a short-sighted way of seeing the world, that the great tragedy of African-American life is that the only way forward is jettisoning of our anger. But of course it can't truly jettisoned, it can only be hidden and in moments like this it returns.

Feminists have expended whole barrels of ink wondering why the fuck they have virtually no following among black women. But over the past week all I've heard is this stupid-ass attempt to raise the profile of privileged white women at the expense of black boys and girls who I see out on Lennox Avenue scrapping in the belly of the beast. Nothing is more irritating than watching people who think they know what beef is because they watched Roots, and took an Af-Am Studies class at Wellesley, tell me that it's now all good. Hillary, and people who support this sort of invective, are loathsome and disgusting. I don't care if they're racist--they clearly find racism useful. The only women who they care about, the only young girls who they truly are concerned about, are the ones from their side of the tracks.

Especially The Blacks And The White Women

A comment below makes the point that we've heard more about racism than sexism in this campaign. That's probably true, but I don't think it's because racism is less acceptable or that it's because no one it's thinking about sexism. More likely it's because no one credible has actually accused Obama of gender-baiting. There is no one working on Obama's campaign who said that Clinton wouldn't be in the race if she were a woman. Michelle Obama was never quoted as saying that it's good Clinton is running for president and then slyly adding, Shirley Chisholm and Elizabeth Dole also ran for president. Barack Obama, himself, was never quoted implying saying that his base of black voters was synonymous with hard-working America.

My point is that racism has been an issue in this campaign, because Clinton and her people have made it one. I'm not sure I see a strategy here--I actually think that race-baiting hurt Clinton much more than it helped. Whites who would be affected by such tactics were going to go for her anyway. But  there was no guarantee that Obama was going to beat her 9 to 1 among black voters. That's really what killed her. But my point is that I don't so much see conspiracy as a see a complete lack of discipline. It's not that the Obama campaign is less sexist than the Clinton campaign is racist. How would we know that? It's that they're a much more disciplined group that, for the most part, understands that sometimes it's best to just shut up. The same can't be said for Hillary's surrogates. Look at Ferraro. Look at Bill Clinton. These fools race-bait and then defend it. They can't stop digging. And, evidently, Hillary can't pull rank and make them stop digging. Does Ferraro really believe she's helping Hillary's cause now? Probably not. It's just foolish pride, at this point.

Barbara Ehrenreich And White People's Ice

Nice piece from the always interesting Barbara Ehrenreich. Once again the parallels between the black struggle and feminist struggle are just stunning. Ehrenreich pillories this idea that it's some sort of noble accomplishment to show that women can be as vile and nasty as men. Pillory is the wrong word. She recognizes that the idea of innate female superiority is a myth which is ultimately destructive, and its good that Hillary is helping to rid us of that. But Ehrenreich rightly points out that she shouldn't be lionized for it. 

Was I saying something about parallels? Oh yes--this reminds me of how people often celebrate Bob Johnson as a black hero because he showed he could be just ruthless, cold, and calculating as any other white capitalist. Or folks who celebrate Frank Lucas because he showed that blacks too could be organized criminals. Yay. It's also the OJ reflex--defending and celebrating otherwise loathsome people, because the people who run the world are allowed thier share of otherwise loathsome people. There's some truth here--a true end to racism/sexism must include an end to noble savagery, or noble femininity. But the people who push such an end shouldn't be confused with people who actually raise the bar for morality for all people.

George Packer On The Future Of Conservativism

Very nice piece in this week's New Yorker. I'm impressed by the breadth of the sourcing. It is worth noting,however, that David Brooks made this point back in 2004. You remember 2004 don't you? That was the year when fools were running around talking a permanent majority. Brooks, to his credit, saw through all of it. His piece was written before the election. I wonder whether he had any second thoughts. Back to Packer. He has some lovely quotes in there especially from Pat Buchanan who once again reveals himself to be two steps from evil incarnate. Anyway my only issue with Packer is that he subscribes to the myth of Obama's problem with white working class which has been pretty well debunked. Otherwise, I loved it.

Keep Talking...

I don't even know if I should be linking this but what the hell. I felt bad for Rachel Maddow in this. I think she was trying to respect someone who's an icon to a lot of women. Ferraro actually goes so far as to say that Obama's Annie Oakley riff and the "dirt off your shoulder" move was sexist. We're getting to the point where some folks are just claiming disrespect because they lost. I know there's a lot of theorizing out there about this hurting Obama's ability to pull the votes of women. I'd be more likely to believe that were it not for the fact that one of the great tragedies of modern feminism is its inability to really get a hold on a broad swath of American women. I no more buy that Geraldine Ferraro represents American women, than I buy that Al Sharpton represents American blacks, or that John Hagee represents all church-goers. Anyway, one of the good things about watching this is it dispersed any anger I hold toward Ferraro. She's just a nut, and for the past twenty years she's been ignored. Here is her fifteen minutes, and she's milking it for all its worth. I wish her the best. As I've said before, she is not the future.

Bill Kristol And The Quest For Epic Fail

LOL. Dude why don't you just give up.

UPDATE: Isn't this the Affirmative Action of upper-crust white privilege?

The Oppression Olympics (Again)

The most depressing aspect of Democratic primary is the fact that for many of us, it still is 1993. We can disregard the Republicans because, Barack’s observation aside, these cats ain’t really looking like the party of ideas. Should we fall for the same “He’s a commie!” strategy they’ve been running for decades, then like a pro football team falling for twenty straight play-action fakes, we deserve to lose.

The retro thinking that really has me concerned is on our side. A few days back I was doing some last minute blogging before a flight when I came across this gem from Marie Cocco, in which she offers a list of sexist slights endured by Hillary Clinton throughout her campaign. I found almost nothing to disagree with until, I tripped over this fallacious passage:

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

It had been only days since Obama had been thumped in a state in which life-long Democrats volunteered themselves, on camera, to say that they would never elect a black president, or a Muslim president—which this year seems to just mean a nigger president. It had been mere hours since the story broke about about a guy in Georgia selling a tee-shirt comparing Obama to Curious George. Indeed, Cocco’s own paper had recounted a list of racist incidents that Obama’s campaign had endured which had escaped the media’s notice. That last bit is more an Obama strategy than a media blind-spot. Americans hate complainers, no matter how much justice the plaintiff can marshal. Plus Obama’s whole campaign is basically an away game, and Obama crying racism, would be like Jackie Robinson complaining to the ump in ’47, like Martin Luther King pleading his case to Bull Conner.

Continue reading "The Oppression Olympics (Again)" »

Something Ta-Nehisi Can't Play

One result of starting this blog, is a public exposure of my many pockets of ignorance. Take the economy for instance. In fact, if anyone wants to recommend a great "econ for dummies" book (but not in that series) now is the time. That being said, there are still things that I find interesting that I like to highlight, even if I can't bring great insight.

Item: The housing crisis. Here are two pieces that I've read recently which make an progressive argument against bailing out homeowners and, by default, banks that sold stupid loans. Here's fellow TPMCafer Dean Baker:

The banks made bad loans. Businesses are supposed to suffer the consequences of their business decision, good or bad. That's capitalism. However, instead of letting the banks live with the market, we're chasing after them with buckets of taxpayer dollars.

This is truly painful. We must have big fights to get a few billion dollars to provide health care or childcare for kids. How can we suddenly produce billions for banks, no questions asked?

Second a very elegant piece by Joshua Rosner which argues that too many people in America are homeowners. I read this a few weeks back and never got around to posting about. I think it stands the test of time though:

Indeed, we ought to consider what role the federal government has played in creating this mess. By stimulating home ownership while failing to account for the reasons home ownership is valuable to society, Washington has simply sought to buy our votes with our own debt. As the subprime crisis accelerates and threatens to spread through prime and near-prime markets, policymakers face a watershed moment. To keep us from an economic nightmare, they need to replace the dream of home ownership with policies that actually increase wealth--not just the illusion of it

I find this whole debate interesting because they offer liberal arguments for laissez-faire. I'm a bit of a left-libertarian, in terms of social issues, and to some extent in terms of economic ones also. (At least the ones I understand!) Thus there's a large part of me which resists the idea that everyone--and maybe not even most people--who took out a bad loan was hoodwinked. The thought of homeownership is intoxicating to most grown folks, and I could see some people really overstating their capabilities. Practically though, it's awful politics--as John McCain will soon learn--to look at the people who you want to elect you and tell them "Suck it up." There has to be a middle ground, no?

Breaking News: Obama And Clinton Supporters Don't Like The Opposing Candidate

I know I just criticized the survey article, but i should have mentioned that are much more loathsome alternatives. Like this piece in which the reporter uncritically excepts a bunch of stats and then finds some folks to agree with a conclusion, that probably was drawn before the story was even pitched. I don't like what media has become. But unlike people who think blogs are ruining the world, I'm not sure I ever liked what media was. On any given day I'd rather be reading Andrew Sullivan than Maureen Dowd. I'll take my man dNa over at Too Sense (or anyone over at Too Sense) over Bob Novak any day of the week. Now, I'll take a great book, or a great New Yorker profile over my own blog, also. But this idea that blogs are killing journalism is just stupid. Bob Novak is ruining journalism. That show where daily sportswriters argue and are given points (can't even remember the name) is ruining journalism. That kid Ta-Nehisi Coates is ruining journalism. Spit. Hot. Fire.

The End Of Geraldine Ferraro (In Democratic Politics At Least)

The biggest thing that stood out for me when Geraldine Ferraro went on her stupid rant was her contention that, because she was a fund-raiser, Obama should be nice to her. The very idea that she thought her role as fund-raiser made her somehow indispensable to Obama--in the midst of headlines like this--was a metaphor for the entire Clinton campaign. It was like listening to some editors I've known drone on about blogs. Time had passed her by.

Anyway, Ferraro rears her head again in Jodi Kantor's piece on women and the Clinton campaign. The piece is working in the flawed "survey article" genre, in which you gather a collection of quotes from people who disagree, and arrive at no real point, except that, people, uhm, kinda disagree. It's middle-of-the-road-ism at its worst. That said, there's some good reporting, and some things in it which make me even more happy that Clinton has lost:

Some even accuse Mr. Obama of chauvinism, pointing to the time he called Mrs. Clinton “likeable enough” as evidence of dismissiveness. Nancy Wait, 55, a social worker in Columbia City, Ind., said Mr. Obama was far less qualified than Mrs. Clinton and described as condescending his recent assurances that Mrs. Clinton should stay in the race as long as she liked. Ms. Wait said she would “absolutely, positively not” vote for him come fall.

Ms. Ferraro, who clashed with the Obama campaign about whether she made a racially offensive remark, said she might not either. “I think Obama was terribly sexist,” she said.

Cynthia Ruccia, 55, a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Columbus, Ohio, is organizing a group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, of mostly women in swing states who plan to campaign against Mr. Obama in November. “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.

It's PC, these days, to say that we need/want every vote. No we don't. There are certain people who you'd rather lose without, than win with.  If you think Obama is a chauvinist pig for making a joke at Hillary's expense, vote for McCain. If you are a racist ex-token VP on one of the worst performing tickets of all time, quoted in the New York Times claiming Obama has been "terribly sexist" without citing a shred of proof, vote for McCain. If you think that because your candidate lost, you've been disrespected, if you think women, or "Clinton supporters"," or whatever, are the Democratic Party's most loyal constituincy, and then decide to show that loyalty by campaigning against the Democratic nominee, by all means, do your worse. We don't need you.

And Yet Not Far Enough

Nice post from my old colleague Tony Karon. As thrilled as I am by Obama's candidacy, I often wonder if his boldness springs not so much from incredible courage, but from the incredible fecklessness of today's pols. He rightly gets credit for rejecting the gas-tax holiday, but he was given that opportunity by the cowardice of McCain and Clinton. Anyway here's Tony pointing out the places where Obama can't go, even though America really should:

But while Obama went on the offensive over the Bush foreign policy of empty posturing that has actually empowered the likes of Iran and Hamas, he may, in fact, have dug himself a hole on the substantive question of talking to Hamas. Obama insisted he had stated “over and over again that I will not negotiate with terrorists like Hamas.”

That, of course, is the wrong answer, because as Joe Klein made clear this week, talking to Hamas is nothing less than the duty of the U.S. government. Anyone with any serious grasp of events in the region knows that peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas are not peace talks at all, as Daniel Levy so eloquently explains, because Abbas and Israel are allies, not enemies. Today, it is the Israeli Defense Force, rather than Fatah, that is the principal guarantor of Abbas’s political survival. And any peace agreement between Israel and Abbas will have no impact whatsoever on the ongoing conflict between Isael and the Palestinians. So talking to Hamas, in fact, is the only game in town when it comes to seeking peace. The only alternative to talking to Hamas, or to Iran for that matter, is war.

Feministing On The Sexism Of Obama

Uhm, they're basically right. It ain't Roe v. Wade, or expanded childcare, but the kid has to watch himself.

If You Are A Progressive...

...than this is what you've been waiting for. Sorry I'm late on this guys--been traveling for the book. But this is great. Eff outflanking them. Triangulation gets the bozak. As Obama has said, go right at them. I don't know if this will work. But that isn't the point. The country deserves to know what it's really made of, as opposed to being tricked, and pandered to. Tell them the truth--that there is nothing tough about losing a war, that there is nothing strong about being stupid

Eve Fairbanks On Mittens

Very nice take-down of The Groveler. Mitt Romney always struck me as the epitome of "Say Anything." Oh man, I wanted so bad for Obama to run against him. Anyway, Eve Fairbanks catches up with dude's quest latest quest:

Romney stalls, beaming a smile out from under a fresh coffee-brown tan. "Certain movies have had an influence. ... The Manchurian Candidate ..." Finally, the gears deliver up the only thing on the mental production line these days: a way to praise John McCain. "That movie with Robert Redford, The Candidate," Romney finishes. "Where he is over-promoted and over-packaged, and that's quite frightening. That's what we won't get with John McCain. Nobody has a question whether John McCain is the real deal."

There is a damp, awkward pause. It's as though Romney has acknowledged his own deepest failing: He was overpromoted and over-packaged and, frankly, it sometimes was quite frightening. It could be a sad moment, except that Romney grins sunnily and swivels to bat the next question. Anything, nowadays, to help the big dog.

Romeny for VP. Heh, I'm down for that.

As We Use To Say When I Played World Of Warcraft...

...WTFPWNDBBQ

Please Stop It

Guys, I gotta run and catch a plane, so I don't have the time to do this the justice it deserves. That said, I keep hearing this "sexism vs. racism" argument put forth by Hillary's supporters, who rightly sight the list of sexist slights toward Hillary, but wrongly conclude that Obama has no such list. Most foolishly, they conclude that public slights are the worst part of the problem of racism or sexism. There is a reason you will never hear me engaging in Oppress-A-Thons in which we compete to see whose grievances are worse. The reason is simple--I know the limits of my experience.

So, I just need to say this before I scream. Please, stop with the "sexism is the last acceptable prejudice" or "Obama has endured less racism than Hillary's endured sexism" or the blithe quoting of Shirley Chisolm or the "sexism is the most binding force in America," or the "We're lucky to be black." You don't have to run me down to make your point. Have a drink. Take a run. Cut on the boob-tube. Or better yet, open a goddamn book that tackles something that's larger than your own, evidently, accursed existence. Do something that will prevent you from speaking on evils you've never had the privilege of dancing with. I beg of you--just stop it. You aren't qualified to speak on this. And the more you talk, the more we know.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks. Not joking about that plane. Something more analytical, and less raw when I get back. Be safe guys.

Hillary Clinton: Feminism Incarnate

At least that's what some of her people would have you believe. What else are we to make of comments such as the following:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said "we feel abandoned by this organization today."
Rep. Shelley Berkeley called the endorsement "extremely unnecessary" and "inappropriate.
Rep. Jane Harmon called it "a betrayal."

That would be reactions to NARAL's endorsement of Barack Obama. I don't know what to say to this. I think I won't say too much because I bet there are a rack of feminists out there who would take umbrage at the idea of this somehow being representative of all feminism. And frankly, it's not like I'm working in an area of expertise. But so much of this, as a black person, looks familiar that I almost feel like I'm watching the story of my life. Dig the "respect" and "disrespect" meme that's begun to rear its head. Whenever, I hear people talking about "disrespect," I think of 1-15 football teams, or more aptly, brothers on the corner going to war over an alleged wrong look. The "Disrespect Card" is the marker of the man--or woman--who's got nothing else in the tank. In my life, it's been the instigator for more ghetto-ass insanity than I care to remember. Not quite the same, I know, but the requisite foolishness, and element of perceived slight is still there. For more on this, I think I'll hand the mic off to my betters.

I'll also schill a bit more for Obama. Here he is in front of Planned Parenthood:

Things That Aren't Racist

OK, lets just stop this whole idea that anytime you say a word that could be a racial slur, it's automatically a slur, no matter the context. Tom Davis made the mistake of using the term tar-baby in the same memo in which he was discussing Barack Obama:

“Remember,” Davis writes, “Hispanic voters are a swing group in this election and future elections. John McCain, being from a border state, may be out of sync with many Republicans but he has standing among Hispanics. Barrack Obama has not made the sale to Hispanic voters. Thus, this issue is a tar baby for anyone who touches it, with land mines everywhere.”

Uhm, it's classless that he spelled his Obama's name, but come on, that IS a definition of tar-baby. 

Say Anything

Again, courtesy Andrew. Here's our last Democratic president:

“I never thought it would be the Democratic Party that didn’t want to count votes in Florida,” he said at a rally at the University of Montana. “I thought that was a Republican strategy -- or strategery as the case may be. And I just ask you all this, do you really believe Florida would be getting this kind of treatment if the vote had turned out the other way?”

I saw Clinton's presidency from the perspective of a high school and college student. There is so much more that I wish I had known then. This dude makes me ill.

Some Footage From West Virginia

Fascinating...

New Yorkers And Washingtonians

So the first two readings for my memoir--The Beautiful Struggle--are tonight and tomorrow. The first is here and New York, the second is in D.C. Below is the info:

Wednesday May 14, 6:00
Hue-Man Books
2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd. between 124th and 125th
212-665-7400

Thursday May 15, 6:30
Hosted by Vertigo Books
Reading at the Sumner School, 17th & M NW
301-779-9300

Affirmative Action, Sista Souljah And Obama

Noam Scheiber has a very interesting take on Obama as a politician with an uncommon aversion to, well, politics:

Obama has tended to shun similar stunts when they relate to race. The run-up to South Carolina was rife with talk that post-racial Obama was morphing into a decidedly pre-post-racial candidate. To reverse the slide, blogger Mickey Kaus suggested he give a speech embracing class- rather than race-based affirmative action, something Obama had flirted with in the past. Kaus had a point: The atmospherics would have been irresistible to ambivalent whites. I pushed a milder form of the idea on my own blog. Not long after, I got a response from an Obama adviser: Never gonna happen. Urging Sister Souljah politicking on him was the surest way to provoke a scowl.

Matt quotes the same section in making an argument for an Obama switch from race-based to class-based Affirmative Action. For the most part, I also believe in the class-based approach. First of all, forgive me, but I'm not much concerned about the middle class black kid--and there are a lot of them now--who has to go to a lesser state school because he didn't get his first choice. He should have applied to Howard University, and maybe Hampton, anyway. My greater worry is for poor kids for whom college is simply not an option. The fact is that there are disproportionate number black kids who fit in that box.When Obama said his daughters shouldn't receive Affirmative Action, I think a lot of black folks understood that. I think there are plenty of white folks in this country who certainly won't enjoy the privileges that my very black seven year-old son will enjoy as a child.

But a word on the Kausesque Sista Souljah suggestion. Obama is right to resist this. A switch from race-based Affirmative Action to class-based Affirmative Action is an honorable policy. Embracing that policy in order to demonstrate to whites that you aren't a nigger-lover is loathsome. The fact is that the net African-American population in states like West Virginia and Kentucky is minuscule, and race-based Affirmative Action has almost nothing to do with why those states are economically depressed. I would go so far as to say that if you surveyed the average white voter and asked him to list his concerns, abolish Affirmative Action wouldn't even come up.

I think people often forget that Obama is actually black, and saying to a black man that he should kick the shit out of his own to show he's down with the club is, in the main, insulting. I would submit that Obama finds the Sista Souljah tactic distasteful as human being, but also as an African-American. Using black people as a bogeyman to, quite literally, scare up votes is an old tactic. Let's not marry that vile strategy to something that actually is a decent idea.

Josh Says What You Guys Have Been Saying Since Saturday

It's Appalachia:

There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama's problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama's problem isn't with white working class voters or rural voters. It's Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he's getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.

If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.

I doubt any of this will stop fools and nitwits, like this one, from essentially defining "white voters" as "white people who don't like Obama." Still it's refreshing.

From Slate: Feminism Means Never Having To Say You're Toast

Via Andrew, this is from Dahlia Lithwick:

Emily asked a good question yesterday about the proper feminist reading of Hillary Clinton’s weird new Bartleby phase—wherein she is all but mathematically eliminated; superdelegates are running screaming for the exits; the office furniture is being carted out onto the moving vans; and yet still she soldiers on, undaunted, because real women “don’t give up in difficult situations.”

I suppose you can call all this “feminism.” But, as my husband pointed out this morning, if the inability to concede error or defeat—even in light of irrefutable, empirical evidence and in the face of spiraling support and tanking morale—is feminism, George Bush must be the feminist icon of the ages.   

It's been interesting watching the end of the Clinton campaign, because I feel like a certain amount of it hearkens back back to an era of black politics--namely the Sharpe James/Marion Barry era. I wrote a piece some time ago noting the resemblance between Marion Barry and Bill Clinton, but I never considered the bleed effect to Hillary. The way Hillary and her allies make her a stand-in for the entire feminist cause or the entire white working cause, has an eerie resonance with how Barry and James etc. would make themselves the personification of black oppression.

The complicating factor of course is that there there are sexists, there are racists, there are elites who've exploited working whites. Of course the demagogue often conflates the sexist/racist/elitist with anyone who dares criticize that person. Still, expecting a rational response from the victims of irrational bias is probably asking too much. I take great pleasure in the fact that the very racism that Obama has had to deal with in this campaign has forced him to be a better candidate. No black person--and I'd argue no white woman--can win the White House crying "Poor Me." I'd like to tell you that the era of identity politics in the black community is over. But of course, I can't.

Sexism Is The Last Acceptable Form Of Bigotry

Right. Somebody forgot tell these guys that.

Regarding The Varying Tribes Of White America

A reader submitted the following in response to my questions about Obama and white voters. Some of it's been covered by other comments here. But I found it interesting nonetheless:

Regarding why did Ohio vs Wisconsin whites vote so differently…. Wisconsin is Midwest heartland. Ohio dips down south into serious redneck territory.

I’m from Michigan originally, very Midwest place to grow up. My town was pretty blue collar, Ypsilanti, Michigan (dubbed Little Detroit by everyone who doesn’t live there). Ohio is traditionally considered a part of the Midwest. But my Midwest, the one where those “midwestern values” everyone hears about come from, is in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, northern Indiana, northern Ohio and northern Illinois.

I’ve been all through the Midwest states over the years and can attest that the southern parts of Illinois/Ohio/Indiana are very redneck and southern (i.e. racist, generally speaking). Trust me, as a white man who has been all over this country twice, the most racist place in America is the South. It’s not even close – the racism there is such that there’s barely an attempt to conceal it, unless a black man is nearby. I’ve been literally shocked at some of the things complete strangers have said to me there, and offended that someone would think it’s OK to use the N-word at all, much less to a total stranger. Never heard that sort of blatant, shameless racism anywhere else but the South.

I was surprised to read that you say you learned that not all whites thought of blacks the same way. It never occurred to me that anyone would ever consider that we did. I’ve always realized being white made life easier for me in this country – not having to put up with racism, bigots, etc – no way could I really imagine how it must be to live that from birth.

What I’ve come to believe, myself, about what being white in America has given me, is this – I have no cultural heritage, no history and no expectations (positive or negative) affecting who I am or who I want to become. I’m completely free of all of that. I don’t have “a people” to defend, to be a role model for, to represent.

The bad side of that is that I have no cultural heritage, no real history to appreciate, etc. This thought dawned on me when Tiger Woods hit the scene – at first he was the black golfer. Then, when he said no, I’m not only black… and he stressed that he’s a mix of several ethnicities, the backlash surprised me. It became evident to me that Tiger was looked upon with pride in the black community and it was seen, from what I read, as a rejection. I thought, man, that is some pressure. Guy just wants to play golf and all of the sudden the world expects him to be in the middle of race relations. I realized that that never ever happens to a white man.

Anyway, my main point kind of got away from me there, or maybe I got away from it…. just wanted to shed some light on Wisconsin being a good, Midwestern state and Ohio being a redneck state. Plus, I’m a Wolverine fan, so anything I can do to bash the State of Ohio is worth it.

The Negro Sings Of Zionism

There's something distasteful about this whole need for Barack Obama to assure us that he is, indeed, the best friend Israel could ever have. Jeffrey Goldberg has been beaten up some, but I've enjoyed much of his work. Indeed if you want to see how great reporting can be prescient read this piece, pay close attention to the section of Missouri Dems, Claire McCaskill and Hillary Clinton. But it's amazing how much of Goldberg's Q&A is dedicated to Obama proving that he does believe in Israel's right to exist--as opposed to, I guess, believing Israel deserves to be destroyed in a downpour of hellfire. 

But Obama, labors under the burden of being a presumed Hamas agent, and thus twice he has to weigh in on whether "justice is on Israel's side." Given the nature of people, I don't even know what that means. Hell, I bleed red, black and green, but I'd never presume that justice was on black folks' side--at least not as a post-25-year-old. Indeed, these days, I'm much more concerned with getting black folks on justice's side, as the saying goes.

Continue reading "The Negro Sings Of Zionism" »

More On The Black Racist Voter

So ABC just did some polling that revealed the constituency that most wants an Obama/Clinton ticket. Any guesses as to who most wants Clinton on the ticket? Oh hell, who else:

Clinton continues as the preferred choice as Obama's running mate, with 39 percent of Democrats saying they'd like him to pick her if he's the nominee. That peaks at 59 percent of African-Americans, 47 percent of Clinton supporters and 42 percent of women (vs. 34 percent of men).

Uhm...

...always nice to see a referring address from Stormfront in your blog data. I guess the blog is really wide open. But forgive me if I don't venture over to peek in on the convo.

Why Left Wing Propoganda Is No Better Than Right Wing Propoganda

Here's Max Blumenthal's latest, a piece of agitprop that's designed to show angry black folks are over Sean Bell. I, despite my flagrant blackness, have had mixed feelings over this, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. I also am a fan of that Obama guy. Still I think this video largely shows why cats like me are only slightly more comfortable with white liberals than with white conservatives, and why even that bit of consideration may be foolish.

I have some clue that Blumenthal probably likes black folks a little more than Sean Hannity, but I don't really care about that. What concerns me is that Blumenthal shares Hannity's objectification of black people, and sees us not as actually complex humanoids, but as means to an end. It matters little that Hannity's end is to absolve white people of any responsibility, and Blumenthal's end is to show--ostensibly--that the justice system is flawed. The roots of racism always lie in an inability to understand tha the cat on the other side eats/sleeps/drinks just like you. Both white lefties and white righties have yet to come to terms with that.

Blumenthal is case and point, and he tips his hand when he calls Barack Obama to account for the Bell verdict, apparently because Obama is--like Bell--black. But Blumenthal only passingly mentions Hillary Clinton whose job it is to, oh I don't know, actually represent New Yorkers. But Obama, from Blumenthal's perspective, is supposed to side with the black protectors since black people aren't members of the human race, but really are brainless automatons who must always walk together in lockstep unity--preferably to the beat of a Snoop Dogg number.

I make no charges about Blumenthal's ancestry, nor about the sainthood of Obama. Of course Obama was being politically expedient with the Bell trial--that's what he better do if he wants to win. But what's Hillary's excuse? Oh right, I forgot. She's white and entitled to think/say/do whatever she wants. Blumenthal claims Obama is walking a fence between black and white voters, despite the fact that he's pulling in 90 percent of our side, but never mentions that Clinton has been rendered George Wallace by the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency.  Most comically, Blumenthal attacks the Times for their coverage of the Bell case, presumably because they went out  and actually interviewed a diverse set of black folks and found--surprise, surprise--the niggers actually have differing opinions!

Anyway, here's your dosage of white liberal patronage for the day. Enjoy. I need a bath.

How To End The "Actin White" Phenomenon

Send black kids to Kentucky and West Virgina. I should say that I never bought the whole "actin white" idea anyway as any meaningful explanation of anything, besides the bruised egos of few profesional talkers. But its corollary that black America--moreso than the rest of the country--has a culture of anti-intellectualism is so abundantly false as to make me break out into fits of laughter at its very mention. A sampling from all those white folks who value intellectual rigor so much more than us thuggish blacks, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan (yes, I get the irony):

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," - Leonard Simpson, a West Virginia Democrat. Then this:

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. "I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president," he said.

Meanwhile, I get an email like this:

This guy is a muslim trying to take over religion, rights, gunns, and lastly our country.

Does anyone remember 911. He's cunning and a racists. He is connected with dirty money and bad connections in the rest of the world.

Haha. And grammar check! Don't forget the socialist grammar check! Seriously though, if anything exposes the lie that black folks have more disdain for book-smarts than the wider country, it should be the smearing of Obama by legitimate thugs, based largely on the fact that he went to an Ivy League school and doesn't pack a shotgun to Senate hearings.

I do think his bitter remark was condescending, but I think the whole "What's The Matter With Kansas" argument is condescending, cynical and unhelpful, in that it argues that voting for things other than your economic interest is strictly the province of the rich. But what if you genuinely believe that abortion is against the wishes of God? Is the liberal argument that money should trump that? I'd rather have the argument, and lose the votes--temporarily, at least. Anyway, my main point is that this election should really show that anti-intellectualism is an equal plague upon all our houses.

Dog, It Ain't The Same: The Myth Of The Black Racist Voter

One very foolish meme that's made it's way into the primary is this notion that black people voting for Barack in large margins is the equivalent (or on the scale of racism, arguably worse) of white people breaking for Hillary in similar margins. I doubt that anyone who reads this blog thinks like that, and truthfully, I haven't seen it in any of the blogs I read. It's one of those notions that you hear from beefheads like Joe Scarborough or in the Huffington Post comment section. I know, I know, those sources are roughly equal in credibility, but I just want to venture a quick response.

Blacks have been voting for whites for president since they've gotten the vote. There is no question about black people's ability to vote for a white man for president. Even in cases when blacks have a so-called black leader in the actual race, they still--in crucial times--have voted for the white guy. This is why it was patently foolish to infer that Latinos voting for Hillary were racist, when in fact Latinos had supported black candidates on several occasions.

Continue reading "Dog, It Ain't The Same: The Myth Of The Black Racist Voter" »

More On Me And My Pops

Sorta. Actually this is just more shameless shilling for a new memoir I've written. The book is about my father and his relationship to two of his five sons--myself and my older brother "Big Bill." Anyway, there's been a lot of things going on in regards to press. Just wanted to pass folks off some links.

Here I am talking to the Wall Street Journal, mostly about process and why my background as journalist made me suspicious of the whole memoir genre.

Here is a piece in Newsweek that talks about the book and contextualizes it with some other discussions around black men and fathers.

Here is me on the radio talking to one of my father's old buddies, Mark Steiner. The convo was going great until he ambushed me with a critique of the last part of my Nation piece on Obama and Steele. Of course he was right. And my Dad subsequently rapped me for the same thing.

Also we have this piece from Publisher's Weekly about me and my Dad and the confluence of two events--his publication of Walter Mosley's Tempest Tales and Spiegel & Grau's publication of The Beautiful Struggle.

And of course, here is a video put together by some folks at the Atlantic, one of the classiest outfits I've ever had the privilege of writing for. A shout out to Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, with whom I may well be collaborating for my next book! Anyway, enjoy guys.

The Eternal Beautiful Struggle

My father called me today to get on me, as he does at times, for something I wrote. As I discuss in my Atlantic piece, the last time we really got into it was over a piece I did for the Voice in which I dismissed Bill Cosby as the "patron saint of black elitists." Harsh, yeah and not something I would say today. But still me and Dad remain on different sides of the Cosby story. Pops is sure Bill Cosby is doing a world of good for black folks. I'm not so certain. But as I've told many people, this is how I was raised. Me and my brother Menelik always joke about how Dad used to put on NPR in the car and then debate you over your opinion. Pops raised us to think a little different, and so it's natural that on some things, we come out on different sides.

Of course sometimes, he's just right. Today, I was walking down Lenox Ave. talking to him about something I'd written in the Nation about Obama, which he generally liked. But there were two points of disagreement that he held fairly strongly. The first being this very general statement about Obama, black folks and racism that I make in the piece:

This is why all the fuss over how much or how little Obama addresses racism misses the point. Obama mentions white racism about as often as black people actually think about white racism--which is to say rarely.

This is not an endorsement. I came up waving The Final Call and convinced that the answer to everything lay in the last words of Frantz Fanon. To which most of my friends would reply, "So, who won the game last night?" Survey the average voter in Harlem, Detroit or West Baltimore, ask her to rank her presidential concerns and see where "reparations" or "abolishing the Confederate flag" compares with, say, "healt hcare" or "ending the war." In the wake of Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia, the pundits swooned, marveling specifically at Obama's willingness to say that those who fled inner-city America, who opposed affirmative action, were not racist.

That's kind of true, but--as my Pops said--it basically argues that black people aren't concerned about racism in any respect, which just ain't the case. Two things are going on there. As a kid, I was a fairly militant cat and one of my constant pet peeves was how "unconscious" I thought black people were. Thus when I hear someone like Steele caricature black America as this lefty black nationalist cabal, it goes against everything I know. And it should. But what I missed was how my perspective also colors things. It's simply incorrect to say black folks only rarely talk about "white racism." More to the point, they talk about it in a much more complicated way than most people think.

Continue reading "The Eternal Beautiful Struggle" »

Speaking of The G Spot...

Kathy pivots off my rebuttal to Hitch, and makes a pretty good point:

The Hitchens piece, contemptible piece o' shite though it is, a surefire sign that, now that it's clear Hillary's presidential campaign is all but over, the right is proceeding apace with its attempt to Hillary-ize Michelle Obama. We have, of course, all heard about how "unpatriotic" she is. Maureen Dowd has already cattily attacked her for not being sufficiently deferential to her husband. And now we're being treated to Hitchens' exegesis of how her college term papers prove she's really Stokely Carmichael in drag. Delightful! But hey . . . radical, unfeminine, unpatriotic -- remind you of any other right-wing caricatures of a certain prominent Democratic woman with a famous husband?   

Kathy puts Hitch's take in with the sort of attacks that people once hurled at Hillary. I agree. But I think I was more taken aback by the naked laziness of the Hitchens piece, than I was by the conclusion. But I guess Kathy would say that's the point. It's not like the attacks against Hillary back in the 90s were the result of deep contemplation.

Hello New People!

Thanks to Matt Yglesias, Kathy G and Brad Delong for referring people over here, and letting me leach off their audience. Lotta new eyeballs here. Hope you guys stay. Guess this means I actually have to start thinking before I blog. And using the spell check. Can't forget about the socialist spell-check. Seriously though, the pieces in The Atlantic and The Nation have really garnered some new eyeballs, which is cool. Of course the problem is that you now get fairly intelligent people disagreeing with you. I miss the good old days of writing at the Voice, when I used to get to say things like this, and nobody said a peep, cause nobody was reading. It's a new world I guess. Or maybe not. We'll see.

From The Department Of There Is No Racism....

Not that I think the Secret Service is racist, but...

Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents.

The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors.

For the record, they had to search through 20 million electronic documents over 16 years. I think if you had searched all my e-mail over the past year you could turn up some gems. <Ahem> But what interests me most is the joking about the death of Jesse Jackson and his wife. I have my beefs with Jesse, but I've never quite understood why he engenders so much hate in certain quarters of white America. Admittedly, this is from a biased black perspective, but most of the people that irk me at least have some sort of power to influence something. When I hear Rev. Hagee blaming Katrina on the gays, it bothers me because we know that nuts like him have the ears of the highest levels of American government and thus can influence policy. Were he just some dude ranting, I really could care less.

When I had cable I used to love the A&E documentaries on the KKK--I found their "Kill the blacks and the Jews first" quite humorous, mostly because I knew it was basically the rantings of pathetic powerless people. It's not like those guys are influencing anything in my life. (Were this 1963, I would probably feel different.) Likewise, what is Jesse really doing to white people? What has he ever done to white people besides get them a day off from work? Again, I'm not saying Jesse isn't problematic and slippery. But really folks...

You Guys Should Be On TV

Seriously. In the post below, I called for explanations to Barack's problems in Applachia and the South. What I got was some sterling and intriuging responses I'd like to highlight. What amazes me is that for crap people talk about blogs and the internet, I can post a question, and within a few hours get some fairly nuanced, complicated and intriguing explanations that run much deeper than the cliche, warmed-over, working class white people, NASCAR Dad, Defense Mom, Beer Track, Wine Track, intellectual swill that served up every night on cable news.

On a quick sidenote, this is why Buzz Bissinger was wrong the other day when railed against blogs and claimed that they were ruining journalism. Traditional journalism doesn't need blogs to ruin it. Traditional journalism is doing fine running down itself, thank you very much.

Anyway Bravo guys. Here is what we have:

From Don Weightman (Dude, are you screwing with me?):Yeah. I have a theory. The Scotch-Irish in Appalachia -- southern tier NY, Western PA, eastern & southern Ohio, western VA, on down -- love her, hate him. Those guys are clannish, anti-cosmopolitan, hate "outsiders". Too bad Obama. They love fighters, fighting dirty is fine, Yay Hillary. Look at the immigration and cultural-political statistics for those guys. The patterns are all laid out in David Hackett Fischer's wonderful book Albion's Seed, It details the effect of the various strands of British emigration on the way we live now. As to West Virginia, read it and weep.

From Zak:

The Clintons are particularly popular among Southern & Appalachian whites; since the latter tend to be poor, this seems to correlate w/economics, but I think it's as much cultural as anything. Bill is seen as one of them, and some of this rubs off on Hillary. Factor in the traditional competition for jobs between poor whites and (mostly poor) blacks in the South, and you've got Obama's "Appalachian Problem," as Slate called it a couple weeks back.

From Roger Bigod:

Yes, folks from the Borderlands. The ones who stopped off in Ulster for 100 years or so are known as Scots-Irish. Fisher is good. Also, James Webb's "Born Fighting". Briefly, the central governments of England and Scotland didn't control the area for 500 years. The result was a people who're clannish, resist authority and value physical prowess. They're not racist so much as distrustful of difference. The governor of Louisiana, Jindal, is Indian. He lost on his first try, mainly on the redneck vote from north central LA. He went back frequently for 4 years to speak at meetings of men's civic clubs, no doubt to assure them that he like to hunt and fish and was an all round good ole boy. It helped that he went by "Bobby", not "Piyush". He didn't go out of his way to mention his Rhodes Scholarship either.

From Alex Whalen:

I would guess that it has something to do with average age of the population. Obama's problem has never been race, or at least never just race. He's only really struggled in states where the population is particularly old. WV, OH, and PA are all examples of this phenomenon. Once the state's manufacturing base disappeared, there wasn't much to keep the next generation from leaving, and over time the state's population turned a much deeper shade of gray.

Continue reading "You Guys Should Be On TV" »

So Much For That Theory...

Remember when it was popular to say that Obama's best states were those with either a high percentage of black voters or state's with none at all?

As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.

Except that West Virginia--with a menancing 3 percent black population--is about to had Hillary a whopping victory. And what about Kentucky with its 7 percent black population? The idea that places without black folks will somehow be more receptive to a black president is too simplistic. Not that I have any better theories. Geography maybe? Obama seems to have a particular problem with whites voting in Democratic primaries in Appalachia and in the Deep South. Someone out there, with a better knowledge of history than the kid, should offers us theory. Any thoughts guys?

Especially The Blacks And The Jews Pt.421228976

Heh, Jeff Goldberg is doing a "Cooking With Elijah Muhammad" series of at his new blog. Of course I found this most humorous:

It was Malik Zulu Shabazz who once called me a lox-eating Jewboy. Which, though offensive, contained an element of truth

Zulu Shabazz is, I'm sorry to admit, a Howard man. Back in the day, David Plotz did a wonderful number on him in Washington City Paper. It was one of the first pieces I saw, in fact, that made me want to work there. Anyway, Goldberg takes on Elijah Muhammad's nutty How To Eat To Live. It was that book (along with the contention of many folks I respected that Farrakhan was involved in the death of Malcolm) which convinced me, at the tender age of 15, that I could never join the NOI.

I can't remember the exact contents, but my recollection was that you basically couldn't eat biscuits, collards, black-eyed peas and cornbread. I may have that wrong, but I just remember that the list of foods you couldn't eat were some of my favorites. "Jew-bait and demagogue all you want," said the younger I. "But no way you're coming between me and my biscuits and black-eyed peas. No true man of God would dare such a thing."

That said, Bean Pie--an invention of the NOI--is one of the greatest culinary oxymorons ever invented. Sounds disgusting, but it's absolutely delicious. My Dad, after grumbling that the bean pies on the street hadn't been the same since Elijah died, once made a batch of em scratch. By Master Fard's ghost, I swear they were the win. When I went off to college the brothers would buy a Brother Howard bean-pie, and eat it with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. They called it the Muslim Sleeping Pill. Then the word leaked out that the Brother Howard Bean Pie wasn't authentic. It was made by Seventh Day Adventists. Fun times.

The Great Jon Chait On Hillary's Conservative Populism

Really nice piece here. A small taste:

Social science analysis is the mortal enemy of conservative populism. The liberal populist sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an appeal that can't be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more manly? (James Carville: "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two.")

If a liberal populist cites experts or numbers to back his position, that only proves to the conservative populist that he is out of touch. It's the intellectual equivalent of buying arugula from Whole Foods. A Clinton endorser addressed a rally last month, "You didn't go to Harvard! You weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth!" (Never mind that Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and had a far more stable, middle class upbringing than Obama.) In the liberal populists' world, the locus of evil is K Street. In the conservative populists' world, the locus of evil is Cambridge,Massachusetts.

In Clinton's defense, she obviously does not believe her own social conservative rhetoric. But neither do Republican social conservatives. She is not running for president so she can suspend the gas tax any more than George H. W. Bush sought the office on order to increase the rate of flag-saluting.

One Damn Fine Editor Speaks On The War On Drugs

From the desk of the Atlantic's James Gibney:

The war on drugs not only wastes law-enforcement resources, it also corrodes our respect for the law in general. Using a relatively benign drug like marijuana should become a regulated pastime, indulged in by consenting adults, much like drinking alcohol or gambling. Drunk driving kills more than 17,000 people each year, and 3 percent of the U.S. population meets the criteria for "problem gamblers." But no one talks seriously about reviving the 18th Amendment or shuttering Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Why? Because Prohibition taught us that banning such activities creates a nation of lawbreakers and a popular culture that exalts criminality. Costly, dubious, and ineffective legal strictures just end up undermining the social compact they're intended to reinforce.

He's responding to a cocaine bust out at San Diego State University. Of course he ends by saying the law as the law and claiming little sympathy for the "can't-we-all-just-do-a-bong" crowd. Heh. I resemble that remark.

Barack Slaps Up Mitt Romney

Again Courtesy of Balloon Juice. Oh Mittens. If only we could have run against you. The dismissal occurs somewhere around 2:00...

LOL Of The Day

Courtesy of Balloon Juice:

Hehe. "socialist spell check." Nice.

We Don't Care If You Like Us

Joe Conason raps Hillary for her stupid hard-working, white people crack. But then comes the obligatory "not a racist" defense:

The tragedy is that neither Clinton carries even the slightest racial animus, as their many African-American friends and colleagues would testify, no doubt. Bill Clinton's first and most dedicated political adversary in Arkansas was "Justice Jim" Johnson, a Klan-backed Democrat turned Republican who was that state's version of Wallace. The Clintons spent years working to defeat Johnson and everything he represented, and he repaid them with years of plotting, scheming and smearing as a cog in the Arkansas Project. He hated them, first and foremost, because they represented the Democratic Party's rejection of white supremacy in the South. As governor, it was Bill Clinton who erased the last vestiges of Jim Crow from the Arkansas Constitution.

So the Clintons probably understand the essential evil of racism better than most white politicians. They have certainly done more than most of today's white politicians to combat that evil. That is why, as they contemplate the conclusion of this campaign, they deserve better from themselves than to encourage doubt about their decency and character.

Dog, we don't care whether you have any "racial animus" or whether you "understand the essential evil of racism." If you're willing to feed the fears of those who have "racial animus," how are you any better? Indeed, Intentionally playing into racist stereotypes--which you know not to be true--is arguably WORSE than actually believing them. At least the believer is being honest, and perhaps, can be talked off the ledge. What Conason is proferring is an immoral "knowledge without responsibility" standard, in which those who knowingly stoke and benefit from evil are somehow morally superior to those who blindly do evil. Dude, to paraphrase Anthony Lane, break me a fucking give.   

Hillary As The Bard Of Beer Track

Robert George advances the laughable notion that Hillary Clinton could cobble together a winning coalition of Latinos and working class whites, at the expense of African-Americans:

I have long had the belief that, in the back of the Clinton's mind(s), there exists the ultimate "nuclear option": They are willing to risk the Democratic Party's long monolithic grip on the black vote (by denying Obama the nomination). Indeed, they may be willing to sacrifice as much as 25 percent of the black vote with an eye toward cobbling together a new general election coalition of more working class whites -- and Latinos. As my erstwhile colleague Ryan Sager has noted, the fertile ground for Democrats right now is the Mountain West states --Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico. Hillary and Obama split those four states -- but she has consistently done better among Latinos (that fact alone probably explains poll numbers showing her doing better than Obama against McCain in Florida).

The problems within this analysis are numerous, most of them springing from a need among right-wingers to inflate the powers of the Clintons.  It's amazing to me how, even though Hillary Clinton has had her ass handed to her by a freshman senator, how her team has been repeatedly outmatched and outwitted, she's still thought of as this dominant political force. Folks need to listen to Bill Parcells on this one--You are what your record says you are. Clinton is the loser of a campaign in which everything favored her--that's who she is. Not the second coming Roosevelt.

Furthermore:

A.) To the extent that "Working Class Whites" even exist (what an incredibly lazy term), they have about as much of a beef--I would argue more of one--with Latinos as they do with African-Americans. Immigration is the big fear these days, not Affirmative Action.

B.) George's analysis assumes that Hillary Clinton somehow naturally has more appeal than Barack Obama to the WCW, in a general election. Folks I just don't buy it. More likely, in a general election, the same people who wouldn't vote for a black guy wouldn't vote for a woman anyway. And that group was probably going to go Republican anyway.

C.) Hillary Clinton's standing amongst Latinos isn't based on any great natural affinity--it's based on familiarity. John McCain has a much more concrete claim to Latino votes. Clinton's dominance of the Latino vote is an expression of her political muscle and the deep roots of the Clinton machine. The loyalty there is vastly overstated.

D.) Clinton's dominance of the WCW is overstated and distorted. In fact, in key states like Virginia and Wisconsin, she showed no such dominance. Her claim is mostly based on Ohio and Pennsylvania. But Barack Obama has been dominated the black vote in every state.

Hillary is a woman without a real country, and that really has been her problem from jump-street. Her pose as working-class heroin and her incessant race-baiting is actually a reactive measure, that came about after black voters abandoned her campaign. Not that any of this even matters. George asserts "that Democracts though who are confident that 'this is over' had better think again." But why? I demand that people who still hold on to the thought that Clinton will be the nominee show me tangible proof of how that's going to happen. Don't just make naked assertions. Back it up.  

Especially The Blacks And The Jews Pt.521223467

dNa has a nice post about the Andrew Charles case. As dNa suggests in the comment section, maybe we'll get into it at the panel. Any some folks may see this as a further rupture in the holy coalition between ththe blacks of Europe (the Jews) and the Jews of America (the blacks). Not the kid. Instead, I see a great unifying beauty in the following:

In any case, pursuing a Grand Jury indictment in the case has proven difficult, because Jews have their own code when it comes to talking to the police.

One source suggested the Orthodox community was taking a page from the rap world's "stop snitching" handbook. But it was actually lifted directly from the Code of Jewish Law.

"The Hebrew word is mesira, which means basically you are not allowed to be an informant," said Rabbi Shea Hecht, a well-known figure in Crown Heights. "In essence, I am not allowed to snitch, period."

Of course they won't snitch! They are an insular community, as discrete from larger society in many ways as the poorest inner city, and they have the own notions of justice and punishment. This is just how humans are--but to hear the media tell it, black people are predisposed towards criminality and that's why they won't always talk to the police.

It's always amazing to me how the foibles and mores of black folks are always seen through the lense of pathology and dysfunction. The Blue Wall Of Silence is seen as some sort of mystic force. Omerata is some old-school honorable isht. But "Stop Snitching" is just senseless, alien, thuggism. It's like, "How dare you blacks actually be as flawed as the rest of the human race!"

Heh, The Delusional Lanny Davis.

Wow. Courtesy of TPM. I love how the white vote is the base of the party, when a Democratic presidential candidate hasn't carried the white vote--literally--in decades. It may be that we need the white vote to win, but it isn't the "base." I watch this video and understand why these guys are fighting so hard. Think about. What place will a guy like this have in an Obama campaign?

Blacks vs. The Jews! Race War!! Race War!!!

So somehow during that great discussion yesterday, I forgot to mention that I'll actually be addressing some of these some issues with a bunch of folks more distinguished, more intelligent, and generally more mannered than myself. It's going down May 28th at the National Jewish Student Journalism Conference here in New York. It will be me, Ari Berman, and Sam Freedman. If media reports are to be trusted, we should come to blows about five minutes in. Yeah I know I'm outnumbered and outgunned, but in the words of Obama, I'm wiry. Don't test me now.

Seriously, it should be a great discussion. Details are as follows:

7:00              Blacks, Jews and the Post-Racial Candidate*

Barack Obama's candidacy has drawn criticism from certain segments of the Jewish community.  In this panel, three leading journalists discuss this phenomenon and what it says about the state of the relationship between African Americans and Jews.
Panelists: Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist).
*Event will be held at the Center for Jewish History.  Open to public. Dessert reception to follow.
$10, general admission. $5, students and CJH members. FREE, conference participants.

UPDATE: You can get your tickets here.

There Is No Black Working Class

There isn't much point in debating whether Hillary's latest stupid statement is racist or not. What you call it is probably beside the point. But it does deserve consideration:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

I think the bigger thing is the way "the working class" is so often racialized. In the popular imagination, we never think of black men--or black women for that matter--as being laid-off from the local factory. That's fascinating given that one of the more cited interpretations of the urban plight of black folks revolves around the disappearance  of unionized, unskilled (read: factory) jobs. It also, to my mind, demonstrates how the term "disproportionate" becomes quickly conflated with "most." In other words, we know that undereducated with criminal records have trouble finding work. But most black men don't fit into that category, and most black men (heh, and virtually ALL black women) fit very comfortably in the working class (to the extent that there still is a "working class").  Still, the popular image of your average black person  is that of a slothful loafer, living off the largess of the state. Meanwhile middle-class blacks are nothing more the recipients of Affirmative Action. Only white people who drink Pabst Blue Ribbon work hard. They are the truly disadvantaged.

I don't know if equating "hard working" with "white" was a dog-whistle, or what. I don't much care. Hillary is on her way out. She's a joke. The surest sign of someone being an effete latte-sipping liberal is their acceptance of Hillary as an ambassador the white working class. Why don't we send Karen Hughes back to the Middle East, while we're at it. Nothing would be more catastrophic than for Obama to reach out to Hillary in some vain hope that she'll bring more white males to his camp. I think he's smarter than that. I'm hoping on Clair McCaskill or Jim Webb.

Use Your Condoms, Take Sips Of The Brew...

Here is an absolutely incredible video the Atlantic folks did for my new memoir. Please have a look. It's just beautiful.

I don't mean to...

...keep trading posts with dNA, but this is pretty good. Also there's a nice discussion going on the Blacks and Jews thread. Really good reading.

Especially The Blacks And The Jews Pt.421223467

Nice rejoinder from dNa on my earlier post where I distinguish black antisemitism from black Semitiphilia (WTF? Is that a word??):

Actually, I think it's often the same sector. Jews see that kind of admiration as threatening, because to them it sounds a lot like traditional anti-Semitism, especially when you get into stuff like "Jews only spend money in their community" type stuff. But even when the most anti-Semitic black nationalist starts talking about the Jews, there's this grudging respect, like "you're ruthless, but we wanna be like you and run shit."

But even the idea that Jews "run shit" is based off anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, yeah there are a lot of Jews in high places, but the vast majority of people in high places are white gentile men. Stating that "white men run things" is simply stating the obvious, although don't say it on TV because Fox News will run a clip you you saying that one phrase for the next three months.

I think he's right, in that certainly there is great overlap between the NOI types who think Jews ran the slave-trade and those who hold a begrudging respect. That said, speaking as a guy who grew up around a lot of black nationalists, I didn't really hear a lot of those sorts of conspiracy theories. I heard a bunch of anti-white ones, no doubt. But that whole "Secret History" crap didn't hit me until college. One thing people have to remember is that in the 80s and 90s there was still some tension between the Farrakhan cats and Kwanzaa cats because many of them held him responsible for Malcolm's murder. I knew like one or two people who were NOI when I was a kid--but I knew a ton of Kwanzaa Nationalists.

Continue reading "Especially The Blacks And The Jews Pt.421223467" »

Things I Never Want To Hear Again: "We Should Be More Like The Jews"

There is this constant meme among black folks that we can never come together to do anything right. As Ice Cube once said, "Broke up the family forever\And to this day black folk can't stick together." The other part of that logic holds that other ethnic groups--Jews are usually cited--are somehow better at supporting their own. I remember, a few years back, me and my good friend Eyal Press were coming home from a party and Brooklyn. During the train ride, I explained to him that while black antisemitism gets all the headlines, there is a certain sector of black folks that worship Jews for their vaunted sense of unity. Eyal got a good laugh out of that, mostly because in his picture of Jewish life, debating and fighting were central.

But I digress--my point is that I'm going to slap the next black person I hear say "We need to be more like the Jews and learn to stick together." First of all, it caricatures Jews, but more importantly it caricatures us. Last night Barack Obama won over 90 percent of the black vote in Indiana and North Carolina. I don't know what that is, if it isn't sticking together. Unity, in and of itself, isn't a virtue--black folks "unified" behind OJ. But I really believe, given the people left in the running, black folks really got behind the best man for the job. Last year pundits delighted themselves by pointing out that Barack Obama wasn't black enough. I don't know how you get any blacker than having 9 out of 10 of us behind you. I mean really. Malcolm couldn't even have gotten 9 out 10. To paraphrase Chris Rock, Obama is entering into Pat Riley territory.

This Is How You Nail Someone

Dig Jason Berry's superb piece on William "Cash In The Freezer" Jefferson. Beautiful piece of writing and reporting. The Washington Monthly never disappoints. Great magazine in an era when all magazines are endangered.

Christopher Hitchens On Obama and Rev. Wright: When All Else Fails Blame Women

Hitchens is a hero of mine. I still recommend his Letters To A Young Contrarian to anyone under 30.  God Is Not Great is truly masterful polemic. His meditation on the word nigger is the definitive. I respected the point he made when he left The Nation about the dangers of the left becoming, "the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." I even understood his pro-Iraq War stance. That he was dead wrong, and still can't admit it is disturbing and is, for sure, a sort of intellectual cowardice. Hitchens writes like others of us breathe--which is to say constantly. Much of what he produces is quite good. And quite a lot of it really isn't. That's fine. I've served up my share of clunkers, and I don't write nearly as much as him. That said, with the publication of this piece, in which Hitchens--without a shred of evidence--blames the Wright fiasco on Michelle Obama, Hitchens completes his transformation into a part-time hack.

Continue reading "Christopher Hitchens On Obama and Rev. Wright: When All Else Fails Blame Women" »

The Beautiful Struggle Is Out

So my book finally hits stores today. Hooray me. Anyway, there's an excerpt from it running over at The Root. Props to them. The book is basically a memoir of my time growing up in West Baltimore with my older brother and my Vietnam vet/Black Panther father. I think I can truthfully say, it's a pretty good book. I'll try to keep you guys informed about readings and such, without completely turning this blog into a device strictly for hawking my wares.

The Most Burning "Race Issue" Of Our Time

Seriously, the War On Drugs has to reverse course:

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

That, to me, is the most persuasive argument. Obviously this has a heavy toll on the black community--but if this were just a matter of us being more criminally-inclined, I probably wouldn't be so persuaded. Black men are also more likely to commit violent crimes, but I don't think that argues for going soft on violent offenders. In fact, in my ideal world, we'd have harsh penalties for violent crime--race be damned--and drugs would be legal. Violent criminals are threat to my son in a way that capitalists specializing in the cocaine or marijuana market just aren't. The Times grabs a token conservative for the counter:

Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.

“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said.

As someone who lives in a poor neighborhood, I can say that the demand is to clean up--and clean out--violent offenders. I realize that the violent offender is often a drug dealer--but that's a direct result of our drug policy, not the nature of drugs themselves. All along Lennox Ave. you can see brothers walking up and down the street selling cigarettes. Nicotine has, in some studies, been shown to more addictive than cocaine and heroin--but I've yet to see bodies piling up over the "cigarette war." Furthermore, the idea that our de facto policy would be that drugs are illegal, only among people who commit violence is deeply immoral, in that it basically means drug laws exist for poor people only. It's also untenable.

I tried to read some stuff from Heather Mac Donald,  but I found she was much more interested in smacking up strawmen, than addressing real issues. Her piece is titled "Is The Criminal Just System Racist." But that's beside the point. I frankly don't give two hoots about the intent of the law, or the people who made it. We are talking about the actual effects. The better question is, Is it good policy? Is it good for America? Furthermore there are plenty of people like me who believe that gun-violence should be aggressively prosecuted and punished, but marijuana possession (which accounts for 40 percent of all drug busts) shouldn't be.

I'm Saying Whatever It Takes...

...and whatever it takes is what I'm saying:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supported her plan for a gas-tax suspension.

Mrs. Clinton did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on the ABC program “This Week.” A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

This sort of anti-intellectual spiel is just laughable at this point. And it's probably sad that it's laughable. I tend to think that the ignorance of Americans is overrated. I'm not saying most of us are up on Tolstoy. But I am going to be optimistic and say that there is enough info readily available to expose Clinton's gambit for what it is. As for spiffy rejoinders, I'm going to go with Matt on this one, "I had no idea that the economic interests of oil companies were identical with those of the vast majority of Americans."

Sista Souljah's Revenge

I had this long post written out about how glad I was that Hillary was going to loose, and that black people were going to be a significant factor. While it's worth noting that black folk almost never see anyone get their comeuppance, the post felt tasteless. What can I say? Even Clintonites are human. Anyway here's a solid piece from Salon on how the black vote will ultimately cost Clinton the nomination:

The black vote was to Obama what small-state white voters in the Electoral College were to George W. Bush in 2000 -- namely, a concentrated bloc of voters whose power magnified their preferred candidate's electoral support beyond their absolute numerical value. For African-Americans, this should come as a pleasant irony, given the controversies about the counting of their votes in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio four years later...

...The problem for Clinton is that too few other African-Americans, male or female, have reached this same finding. In her inimitable meter, Angelou proclaims in the ad that she "watched [Clinton] become interested in public health and in education for all the children -- and I watched her stand." But Clinton failed to stand for African-American Democrats when the chance presented itself late last fall and into early January, even if doing so meant firing key staffers or dressing down her own husband. Doing that might have denied Barack Obama the near-universal claim to their support he now enjoys, and the black-white coalition he built from it. For Hillary Clinton, the price of that failure may turn out to be nothing less than the nomination itself.

I don't know how much the Clintons have race-baited. I think what looks like a conspiracy to others, looks more like rank incompetence to me. I thought Clinton's remarks about MLK were demonstrably false. Johnson--who once called MLK "that nigger preacher"--was probably the most courageous president ever when it came to the racial divide. But he had his arm twisted by King's relentless pressure. They were partners only because King forced the issue. I think the Billy Shaheen, "drug-dealing" affair was stupidity. I think Bob Johnson is a buffoon, and if Clinton could retract his stupid performance, she would. Ditto for Geraldine Ferraro. I don't see what bloc of voters Ferraro got for Clinton that weren't going to break her way anyway.

I do think that Bill Clinton's point about Jesse Jackson and South Carolina was a nefarious attempt at dismissal. But it's incomprehensible to me that the Clinton folks thought that--in the long-run--race-baiting was a good strategy in a Democratic primary, when your opponent is Barack Obama.But if you consider how inept the other parts of Clinton's campaign have been--writing off caucuses, not planning past Super Tuesday, not having a strong internet fund-raising strategy, a misguided belief in the power of spin--then you see the black thing as a piece of a larger pattern of bumbling.

Especially when you examine the fact that this was not pre-ordained. Barack Obama was probably destined to get a majority of the black vote. But he wasn't destined to beat Clinton 9 to 1 among black voters. That's just insane. And as Salon points out, had Clinton even gotten a respectable number of black voters--20 or 30 percent--she would be doing a lot better right now. But her problems with black voters mirror the larger problems with her campaign. Namely, it's been poorly run. Why here strategy for black voters be any better than rest of her effort?

The Fake Thugism Of Cheney\Bush

Here is my biggest problem with the "War On Terror." We are losing. If you're going ignore the Geneva Conventions, if you're going to spy on Americans, if you're going to torture people and then pretend you didn't, if you're going to brand everyone who opposes you with the broad brush of evil, if you're going to unilaterally invade other countries and execute their leaders, then you can't--you absolutely can not--fail in any respect. What we have seen the past eight years is a group who've basically suspended all the rules and still can't win the game. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about:

Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.

Aren't Republicans supposed to be the badasses? Here you have a group that plotted and killed American soldiers, and yet all of them are now walking free. In the words of Mobb Deep, Bush and Cheney are actresses, trying to play the thug role. These guys are like the dudes on the playground, contstantly mouthing off, and catching a beatdown whenever it actually comes to blows. I'm a flaming lefty and proud of it. I think the Iraq War was a conceptual disaster. I am against all of the tactics that I listed above. But I've also read Lawerence Wright's lovely opus, The Looming Tower, and I believe that there are people plotting against who are nuts and should be killed. I was happy when they got Zaraquawi. Here's my point, because I'm rambling and it's late. The biggest problem with Bush/Cheney is that they are incompetent. It sickens me that they actually captured the people who did the Cole bombing, and now--somehow--they're loose again. Man oh man. I feel for the families of those 17 sailors.

Hillary Clinton And The Scourge Of Corporate Feminism

Nice piece in this week's issue of The Nation by Betsy Reed. Betsy was the first New York editor I ever talked to when I was starting to freelance, so it's an honor to be writing in the issue where she has the cover. Here's her take on Clinton ducking behind the cover of feminism:

The sexist attacks on Clinton are outrageous and deplorable, but there's reason to be concerned about her becoming the vehicle for a feminist reawakening. For one thing, feminist sympathy for her has begotten an "oppression sweepstakes" in which a number of her prominent supporters, dismayed at her upstaging by Obama, have declared a contest between racial and gender bias and named sexism the greater scourge. This maneuver is not only unhelpful for coalition-building but obstructs understanding of how sexism and racism have played out in this election in different (and interrelated) ways.

Yet what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.

Betsy goes on to take on the "A Woman In The White House At All Costs" strategy that she's emerging from corporate feminism. As a guy who's long felt that civil rights-era black leadership has lost the moral high ground, I get where she's coming from. My man Jelani Cobb analyzed this in the Post a few months back when he pointed out how the civil rights crowd has thrown as many monkey wrenches as possible at Obama. What I see here is a generational struggle that cuts across ideology. There's a whole group of older, bitter and angry folks who comprise the Democratic coalition who need to just have a seat.

When Titans Clash: Coates vs. McWhorter!

OK, so not really titans and not much clashing. I just wanted you guys to check out this interview. It's the kid and John McWhorter chatting about the Coz. Lemme know what you think.

Black People Over 65 Are No Longer Allowed To Speak

...except James Clyburn and Joe Lowery. OK, so I'm joking but seriously, from Jesse claiming Obama is acting like he's white to Andy Young asserting that Bill Clinton is blacker than Obama to the Wright Rev, what is with the civil right crowd and the politics of spectacle? Now Barbara Reynolds, whom we have to thank for all of this, is asking for an apology. Ugh. And they say hip-hop made us crazy. What's their excuse?

Barack Obama Is The Blackest Man--Ever

So here's me in The Nation speaking on Shelby Steele and Obama. The Essence:

At night the cable talk shows are filled with trifling gibberish that either extols Obama's "postracialism" or cautions him against being branded the "black presidential candidate." Usually it's both. These pronouncements are almost always made by men who would most likely be hard-pressed to recall the last time they sat down to dinner with a black family. Their viewpoints are shaped by focus groups, polls and warmed-over bromides like "defense moms" and "NASCAR dads." I can't think of a group more ill equipped to bear witness to humanity, much less a phenomenon as intricate and complicated as race in America.

Meanwhile, African-American voters have broken for Obama in margins that make Hillary Clinton look about as popular in the neighborhood as Rudy Giuliani. In this, the hamfisted and befuddled intellects of the world see the "advantages" of being black: chief among them a mindless mass of zombies willing to stumble into poll booths and press a button for the black guy. But what the African-American Obama voter sees is so much more than just the first black President. Indeed, she sees the blackest man to take the public stage ever. Forget about reparations, welfare and white guilt. Forget about 400 years, forty acres and a mule. Forget about the Confederate flag, marching through Jena and Duke lacrosse. Barack Obama is black in the Zen-like way in which white people are white--without explanation. Without self-consciousness. Without permission.

Do check it out.

Please No More Sisata Souljah Comparisons

It's popular for white commentators, for whom black people are merely theoretical, to wonder when Barack Obama will do something that will distance himself from black people. After "black America" is known kyrptonite to any successful endeavor. So here we have Richard Wolffe arguing that Wright represented Obama's Sista Souljah moment:

For a campaign that had little comment on Wright's media blitz on Monday, Obama's press conference was a complete reversal. Many pundits have wondered aloud why Barack Obama has not had a Sister Souljah moment in this campaign, evoking Bill Clinton's 1992 repudiation of the hip-hop star's inflammatory and racist comments. In Winston-Salem Obama went far beyond Clinton's criticism, disowning his former pastor—and running the risk of alienating a community on the South Side of Chicago that has been among his most ardent supporters.

Uhm no. No disrespect to my South Side brothers, but last time I checked, the "South Side of Chicago" didn't qualify as a national voting bloc. What Wolfe wants to say--but clearly has no evidence to prove--is that in dissing Wright, Obama showed his distance from black folks. Except that most black folks--and I bet most black folks on the South Side--think that Wright's performance on Monday was off the wall.

More to the point the "Sista Souljah moment" is the province of white folks who basically regard black people and the fight against racism as some sort of political tool to garner the votes of other more thuggish whites. There is a certain amoralism to all of this. In the minds of the MSM there's this idea that whites who, quite frankly, hold Obama to a higher standard because he's black are the real Americans, the beer swillers, gun-toters. This is when you see that the modern press does not exist to expose demagoguery but to be funnel for it.

The Utterly Depressing State Of Race In This Country

I'm starting to become afraid that this thing will never get fixed. Dig George Packer in Kentucky talking to Hillary supporters. The guy is explaining to him why he won't vote for Obama:

“Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race.”

What about race?

“I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did.” He meant that it went Republican. “Now what caused that? Race. There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people. They know what happened in the sixties. Under thirty—they don’t remember. I do. I was here.”

It's not so much that you don't know this sort of sentiment is out there, it's the sort of matter of fact way Packer reports and then lays it on Obama to fix. I've got great respect for Packer. Unlike any number of pinheads who sequester themselves in Washington think-tanks, to read second-hand reports and reach third-rate conclusions, Packer is the sort of dude who actually goes out and reports and then forms an opinion. I give him mad props for schlepping down to Kentucky to talk to folks.

But in his post he conflates white racism--which dude's objection clearly is--with Democrats' general problem of being perceived as effete latte-sippers. While one is related to the other, they aren't the same. Being seen an effete liberal is an image problem. But white racism is one of this country's most ancient traditions, and the longer I am alive the more I think that it's what will ultimately destroy us. Here is what disgusts me about Packer's post:

It’s a tall order. But Obama has a serious political problem. Until now, he and his supporters have either denied it or blamed it on his opponents. It’s not his fault, but it is his burden, and the way to begin lightening the load is to admit that it exists.

What these fools have never understood is that it's THEIR BURDEN TOO. At this very moment two of the three candidates for president are selling a fraudulent gas tax to the vaunted white working class. It's snake-oil and has been dismissed as such by everyone with a smidgen of economic credibility. Only one candidate has the respect for the intellect of voters to stand up and say "No." But for the great purity of the white race, for keeping his daughter clean as the driven-snow, this beef-head won't even consider a man with decency to level with him. Disgusting.

These dimwits never fucking get it. They had to loose more than a half-million of their own in order to see that slavery was a cancer, and most of them still didn't see it. Martin Luther King leaped in front of bullets in the hope of redeeming them, and they pissed a fit about giving him a holiday. Who actually gets upset about getting a day off? Food prices will be through the roof here. All our children will be baking from global warming. The Iraq War will be in its 30th year. But you know what? None of it will matter as long as the blacks can be kept in their place. When will they get it through their heads that this is their problem too? That we are tethered to each other until the end of this country's days? When will they understand that black America may go down first, but it won't go alone.

Some perspective indeed

So yeah, the people are smarter than the press. As it turns out, people have a bigger problem with Bush's ties to McCain than Wright's ties to Obama. This is chastening for me. It's a reminder to never conflate the American people with corporate media.