Ta-Nehisi Coates: July 2009 Archives

The Wisdom Of Jim Fallows

It's never too late in the evening for a Fallows link. Seriously. This is the best take on the Beer Summit that I've seen.

Songs That Aged Shockingly Well

Even if Bobby Brown didn't. Love this. Summer of 89--one of the greatest years of my life, and probably the second greatest of my childhood. Good times.

Bobby Brown - On Our Own
by jpdc11

Confederate Emancipation And Gay Marriage

Patrick Cleburne was the Steve Schmidt of his day--well sort of. Above is a trailer for a graphic novel which tells the story of Cleburne trying to convince the archons of the Confederacy that slavery was a military weakness, and the only way to truly defeat the North was to emancipate large numbers of slaves and make them into soldiers. My sense is that, like Schimdt's urging the GOP to embrace gay marriage, this was a pipe-dream. --a very visionary one, but a pipe-dream nonetheless.

Maybe it wasn't one at the start of the War, but by the time Cleburne pitched it (1864), it was just too late. Still, in early 1865, Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis gave their ascent, and a small regiment was raised, if we can even call it that. This was a few months before Appamottax and CSCT didn't see a lick of action.

I just finished a chapter in Levine's book when he talks about how the slaves, themselves, forced the Confederates to reconsider their own position. I want to preface all of that by giving some idea of the kind of psychological pretzels these guys were twisting themselves into. They basically had conflicting stereotypes of black people--they thought they were cowards who were happily enslaved, faultlessly loyal to their masters, and yet in need of constant armed vigilance.

The upshot was you'd have the following sort of thinking:

Black people are happiest as our slaves--so happy that they have to be guarded by heavily armed white men at all times.

or

The African slave is, by nature, cowardly--so cowardly that he routinely leaps in front of Yankee bullets to save his master.

At one point in the debate you have people actually arguing that blacks will fight for the Confederacy with no promise of freedom and to preserve slavery. Today we call these people "conversion therapists." Lee, in his defense, sees this as utter madness. Of course blacks want to be free, and arming them without giving them that freedom is, as he put it, "neither smart nor just."

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Portraiture, Colonialism and Racism

Resident contrarian, Breakerbaker offers a lesson on race and art history, pinged to our discussion yesterday of Salome:

I just mean from an art historical perspective. These European white guys having a sort of skewed perspective bordering on colonial fetishism when it came to Africa (most notably Picasso), the Near and Far East (too many French Academics to mention), and the Pacific Islands (Gauguin). There's a sort of sometimes hidden, sometimes overt European colonialism to so much of the painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A couple obvious examples:
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which is generally accepted as the 'first cubist painting' is little more than a culturally insensitive, borderline racist, not to mention misogynist depiction of nude European women striking poses in African tribal masks.
It's nearly impossible to look at any of Gauguin's paintings from Tahiti and not think of the countless adolescent island girls to whom he brought the great gift of syphilis.
The Near East fascination, because of its connection to Biblical stories is far more intrinsic to the longer history of Western Art, so that, along with the unmistakable craft of somebody like Regnault (or Ingres before him) can obscure the realization that these were white Frenchman of the 18th and 19th centuries (in Picasso's case, Spanish and 20th century) depicting a very limited understanding of what it is to not be white and French.
I don't mean at all to take away from the painting, but it is my understanding that the picture was not originally to be of Salome, and was instead to be called something like "The Favorite Slave."

This is over my head, but quite interesting. I thought about race when I saw the picture, mostly because of the woman's kinky hair--but I liked it and thought nothing more of it. Well there is the oft-noted fact of how wide, phenotypicaly, "black" extends in non-New York America. And some bamboo earrings, an I tell you I could have gone to school with old girl.

Also I think, given my obsession as a younger man with naming racism, I am a little fatigued. Well that's not quite right--I've come to accept prejudice as a rather natural thing. (White supremacy, not so much.) Thus, I kind of expect it in the art, and maybe miss some of it.

I looked at the Picasso, and wasn't really offended. But maybe I would be, if I knew more.

UPDATE: It's worth mentioning that highlighting racism--or any other -ism--in someone's work, isn't the same as saying that their art sucks. I think we'd lose a lot of art if started disqualifying stuff based on quotient of noxious ideas. I don't think Breaker was calling for anyone's head.

Open Thread At Noon

The world is yours...

Also Thursday At The Met

Judith by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant. Kenyatta looked at this one, and Salome yesterday and said she has some idea of the sort of woman who I'd be with, if not her--a Puerto-Rican honey, with body. Not really. A Puerto-Rican honey, with body, who liked swords. Or a cross-dresser.

Anyway, above is Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage. I actually didn't know what I thought of this. I loved the portrait itself, but had mixed emotions about the chaos in the background. The more I think on it though, the more I think the chaos had a point.

The saddest thing about hanging out at Art Museums is that I really can't get into the history of this stuff right now. In fact, I don't think I'll be able to for another five years or so. It may be good to check out some docs .

Songs That You Loved That May, In Fact, Suck

Boyz II Men's "End Of The Road" came on the other day in the barber shop. Every fool in Baltimore had that joint on his slow jams tape circa 92. I'd throw something like "Distant Lover" on there too, so the shorties would understand that I was deep. But of course I had "End Of The Road" on there--right after En Vouge's "Don't Go." (The way old girl started, "I'm so glad to see you..." said so much back then.)

I still thing "Don't Go" is decent. But "End Of The Road," eh....I'd say I'm getting old, but a lot of the 90s joints hold up--I still love Jodeci's "Stay." Or there may just be no acconting for taste.

One problem with all these R&B joints is how precipitously lyrics fell off in the early 90s. It's like all the great lyricists became MCs. I'm saying, what happened to "Voyage To Atlantis?" Oh right, he's Mr. Big now.

[MORE]

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Erm, I'm Not Depressed

I keep getting these "Be Happy, Ta-Nehisi!" responses to my posts. I swear I'm fine. I'm actually a really happy guy. Not always comfortable. But often smiling, and usually happy.

Teachable Moments

Gates on yesterday's affair:

Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters - as metaphors, really - in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control. Narratives about race are as old as the founding of this great Republic itself, but these new ones have unfolded precisely when Americans signaled to the world our country's great progress by overcoming centuries of habit and fear, and electing an African American as President. It is incumbent upon Sergeant Crowley and me to utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand.

Meh, I guess.

We have too much faith in talk,--or rather we have too much faith in big men to control events through talk. The obsession with a "dialouge around race" is nauseating. I can't tell if it's real, or just a notion that (much like "postracial") that cable news hosts put to their guests. But it's an extension of this notion that Barack Obama created this America we see right now, as opposed to him being a product of it.

I've had many "teachable moments" around race in the past fifteen years. Very few of them have been inaugurated from up on high. No president could teach me what I learned walking down Broadway to Canal Street, what I learned out on Flatbush. At least not through words.

We have become obsessed with talking. Everywhere you look someone's talking. We need more listening, more watching, more reflection, and more time alone. One of the reasons I tossed the TV was because I felt like having it the house, was like having a friend over who wouldn't shut the fuck up. Or rather I was unwilling to make him shut the fuck up.

Crowley needs to go do his job (within the law, I might add), and Skip Gates needs to go do his. I guess he is doing his. I feel like America is going to be America. I'm skeptical of the power of figureheads to change things. What I'm trying to say--very inartfully--is that knowledge can't, and shouldn't, be imposed. People in search of teachable moments, ultimately need to--and will--teach themselves. It's all all out there.

Thursday At The Met

This is Regnault's Salome. I do it a great injustice by reproducing it here on this blog--you can't feel the texture. Please go see it yourself. Again, this is about knowing something is beautiful and not knowing why. It's like I love Coltrane's "Afro-Blue," but I could never really tell you why.

I do know that it's always nice to see an ample, dark-haired woman smiling at you from across the room. Well any woman really, but today this woman. That her blouse is off her shoulder probably helps. When I saw this I actually started smiling myself.

The Met is haunted. Whenever I'm there, I hear voices. Well one voice telling me all this weird stuff--Get rid of your cell-phone, Walk everywhere you go, Only eat food that you've prepared, After you leave here, write for four straight hours, Gather your loved ones and move to Colorado, Disconnect your broadband...

Freaky, I tell you.

Hard Numbers On Driving While Black

Not that they tell you much. I don't know. It's moments like this when I really feel skeptical of our metric-driven society. That said, I'm sure someone else, somewhere can pull a really sound argument out of this. But it ain't me.

Open Thread At Noon

Yes, I know, not really. But you get the point.

Megan Gets Married

I've gotten some requests to comment on Megan's marriage post:

But more to the point, once we'd decided to do what spouses do, why wouldn't we, well, become official spouses? Just because I enjoy akward five-minute conversations about how my "partner" is a he, not a she, and you know, we really love each other, but we just don't believe we need society's ratification . . . I don't, I assure you. And I'm happy to have society's ratification. Celebrating our marriage will be one question upon which society and I agree 100%.

There are tax consequences for couples whose incomes are roughly equal, as one commenter pointed out. But we are, sadly, not in the happy position of having dual half-million-dollar salaries we need to shelter from the grasping tax man. Besides, marriage is not an investment strategy. And I suspect that the more you treat it like an investment strategy, the less likely it is to work.

I mean if domestic partnership is working for you, I'm happy for you. But when I thought about the reasons not to get married, they mostly boiled down to an instinct for contrariness. I don't need to put myself through a bunch of legal hassle and domestic partner registration just to prove something to Jerry Falwell and my eighth grade history teacher.

I've thought some about this. After much consideration, weighing and consultation I think that best way to capture my sentiment is this:

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

What? You expected a brief attacking marriage as antiquated institution? Meh. People decide what's antiquated, and what's not, by their actions--not overrated writers. Moreover, I've already explained the situation in this household--with an emphasis on this household. I think people should do what makes them happy. Last I looked, I wasn't sleeping with Peter Suderman (dude's legs are too hairy) and that basic idea guides anything that should be said.

I thoroughly reject any nomination as an expert on anything--but most of all on intimate relationships between people. Moreover, as Megan's friend and band-mate, as someone who's actually talked to her about this very subject, I think Congratulations is the sincerest, smartest--and most importantly--loving sentiment I can offer.

The Civil War Report

Gates-Gate, and The Great Racism debate distracted me for the past two weeks from blogging about the Civil War. Which is sad, because I don't think I'll be thinking about a single one of those threads a year from now. That's about my interest--by my lights, I'll take Stonewall Jackson and Jourdan Anderson over Henry Louis Gates and James ~~Michael~~ Crowley on any given day.

Anyway, for those concerned I've been making my way through the reading. I finished Like Men Of War which is about as good a history of the USCT as I've seen. It's missing a core them, narrative or argument. Maybe there's not enough history to make one. But it feels like a kind of "And this happened, And this happened, And this happened" book, without a real narrative arc. But for my porposes, it was great.

I tried to read American Slavery, American Freedom. I found it informative, but very hard to finish. I got about halfway through. For whatever reason, I've been thinking a lot about my own mortality. I can't really slow down for books that aren't that well written. I knocked out Uncommon Valor, which is, sort of, a history of the 4th USCT (some of whom are seen here) and The Battle Of New Market Heights. It's a short book, with some interesting details--especially a speech by controversial general Benjamin Butler just before the battle.

In general, I'm a little dissappointed with the historical work on colored troops. There doesn't seem to be a truly classic history of the USCT, at the moment. I think that may reflect several things--1.) The fact that so many of the soldiers were illiterate, thus a lack of documents. 2.) The real, if unpleasent, fact is that very few of them saw combat in the battles we tend to spend the most time talking about--The Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Gettysburg, Antietam etc. 3.) It really seems that most of the people interested in the actual military history are the sort of writers who sympathize with the South. 4.) It may also just be that this is a subject people have only recently (last 30-40 years) started to take seriously. Perhaps some of the historians here would be willing to weigh in on this.

Right now, I'm on Bruce Levine's book Confederate Emancipation, a history of the debate over arming slaves to fight for the South. Man's capacity for intentional self-delusion is, well, stunning. It's also becoming clear to me that something happened to the South in the late 18th century and early 19th century to turn it from a slave-holding region, to one that believed slavery was integral to economic interests and cultural identity. We go from Thomas Jefferson, a slave-holder, veiwing it as a neccessary evil to John C. Calhoun viewing it as an unchallengable, and divinely-inspired good. During the Revoloution when the English offered freedom to slaves who fought for them, the Americans had no problem matching that offer. But by the time of the Civil War, the notion of the South arming blacks to fight seemed insane. I suspect the cotton boom has a lot to do with this. But I don't know.

Anyway, that's where I am. Expect to see some posts about Patrick Cleburne--hero to Lost Causers the world over.

Kelly Kapowski Is Too Busy

Hah! Saved By The Bell is the worst show that every one of us watched. By watched I mean damn near every episode.

Tiffani Thiessen is Busy from Tiffani Thiessen

Lucia Whalen Speaks

Again, it's very hard for me not to see how this wasn't stupid police work:

Lucia Whalen, whose 911 call led to the arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home, made her first public comments Wednesday, saying at no time did she ever mention race to the responding police officer.

Ms. Whalen said that the only words she exchanged with Sergeant Crowley in person were, "I was the 911 caller." She said that he responded, "Stay right there."
Ms. Whalen, 40, her voice cracking, said she was deeply hurt by the reaction to the incident on July 16.
"When I was called a racist, I was the target of scorn and ridicule because of things I never said," she told the reporters gathered in a park here at midday. She added, "The criticism hurt me as a person but also hurt the community of Cambridge."
On Monday, the Cambridge police released the tape of Ms. Whalen's 911 call in which she told the dispatcher she had "no idea" if two men -- who turned out to be Professor Gates and his driver -- were breaking into the house, repeatedly mentioning that they might live there. She said that the two men pushed a door in with their shoulders, and that she was unsure "if they live there and just had a hard time with their key."
Ms. Whalen did not mention the men's race until a dispatcher asked her if they were black, white or Hispanic.

I am giving the benefit of the doubt here, and assuming the officer isn't lying. But again, journalists--of all people--need to stop confusing a police report with the truth.

Things All Nerd Fathers Must Do Before They Die Pt. 2

Watch everything Bruce Timm ever made with their kid. The last two seasons of Justice League just came in the mail. The Question FTW.

Things All Nerd Fathers Must Do Before They Die...

Number one on the list--Watch Robotech with your kid. We're watching the third season with Rook, Rand, and those bad-ass cyclones. The first season is decent. The middle one sucks. (Hover-tanks, meh.) It's ill to think they had a cross-dresser in an 80s cartoon.

Wouldn't Want To Be In L.A. Right Now

Courtesy of The Corner, here's a word from a cop on the beat:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

In other words--Do what I say or you risk being shot. Radley Balko gives this credentialed thug the smack-down he deserves. But it must be said that it's unsatisfying. This guy is still on the streets.

I'd add something else interesting that I've noticed in all of these threads. A lot of police want the right to carry a gun, and they want to be empowered by the state to arrest and kill. But they also want to pawn off as much responsibility, or risk, that comes from that power as possible. Indeed, what this officer wants is for the people who he's supposed to be protecting to assume the risk. Amazing. Who the fuck is he serving and protecting, besides himself?

Oh Right...

Open thread. Go for it. My brain is fried...

The Great Fantasy Debate

So, I've only done Fantasy Football once. I'd like to hear the merits of doing the Pick 'Em thing, versus a Salary Cap League. Thoughts?

Nutso

It's funny. A few weeks ago I was watching Al Roker ream out Spencer and Heidi. Roker was all incredulous and attacking them for basically doing anything to be famous, without noting that they were all on the same network.

I love watching these "respectable" journalists get all indignant with provocateurs that they invite on their show--like they actual thought the guests would be sensible. Dig Michelle Malkin below, and Matt Lauer who is shocked--Shocked!--to discover that Malkin thinks, among other things, that the Gates question was planted and Michelle Obama's entire professional career was based on nepotism. That last part is almost a verbatim quote.

I know who Michelle Malkin is. But I left the interview wondering about Matt Lauer. And you can leave this post wondering about me, given that, you know, I actually know who Spencer and Heidi are...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

On Yelling

No more. I promise. I'm amazed any of you read that.

Defining "Street"

A lot of folks below noted, in the post about Vernon Forrest, that there's nothing "Street" about stepping up to protect your kids. I think this sums up the feeling:

No- I grew up pretty suburban, and I nearly ate someone's neck when they pushed and yelled at my 6 year old a couple years back. I'm taller than you, and am usually fairly conflict management oriented, but protecting your kid may feel like street, but it's deeper and more primal than a cultural overlay.

I basically agree with this, but I want to take it a step further. The commenter argues that what I really was obeying was a deeply primal instinct. It's funny because that's exactly how I always defined "street." You know, at our core, we're pretty violent. I don't say that in a condemning way, the little reading I've done on the nature of animals indicates that the impulse toward violence, some of it pretty savage, is a natural thing.

Here in Harlem, I'm shocked by how often the smallest offense can turn to threats. It's been like that in just about every neighborhood I've ever lived. Someone cuts you off while walking down the street, and it's an international incident. Of course it was insane in the 80s--you leave an accidental footprint on a dude's suede Pumas and you better be ready to go for the guns. There's a sense that that sort of foolishness comes from a particular cultural place, that most people can't access. But I think it actually comes from a deeply human, perhaps even biological, place.

One of the great features of capitalism is that it takes an old dynamic, the desire to dominate, and harnesses it to productive ends. I think a lot of poor people in urban America, feel, on some deep level, that they really don't have a shot at competing in that way, and so they get hyper-protective about what they do have. The jewels, the kicks, the fitted, and most of all, basic respect. Now, this may look alien--but I'd maintain it's very natural, and is exactly what happens when you put human animals into a society that prizes the material.

In other words, I'd submit that Street Knowledge is exactly what the commenter is talking--primal law. The "culture" masks what is, essentially, an animal dynamic. There's a reason that they call it "Jungle Law." It's funny because, as a kid, I was a terrible student of Street Knowledge. But you get disrespected enough times, and suddenly it's a part of you, you're indoctrinated. Or, more aptly put, you're not indoctrinated--you're revealed. Or maybe more aptly, you revert. You are not so much acculturated, as you are forced to go native, to obey basic primal impulses--and then a culture arise around that.

I've been doing some reading about the early history of Richmond, Va. And one guy was saying that the violent crime rate, in some years, when you consider the population, in Richmond would actually exceed the crime rate today. We're violent creatures. I'd submit that we all have a little "Street" in us. It's just a question of what it takes to bring it out.

UPDATE: Forgive the font guys. My brain is exhausted, after last week.

I'll See Your Momma On NPR

I'm going Talk of the Nation in a few minutes to share that little bit which I know about the world. Feel free to comment as I talk. In other news, why doesn't everyone use Skype?

Maybe I'll level my fishing while I talk. One day, I will win that contest in Stranglethorn. OK, maybe not...

The 911 Call

Andrew notes that there is no mention of race in the phone-call, but that Crowley put it in the police report. I'm not immediately sure why that's significant, beyond the fact that people need to stop acting like police reports are indisputable fact.

What's more disturbing is that the woman was, apparently, calling on behalf of older woman, who herself hadn't lived in the neighborhood for long. Again, she's not wrong. But the cop comes in with half of a story, assuming the worst. And then it goes from there.

It's very hard for me to accept, that with these facts, that the officer acted did not act stupidly and indeed, by his lights, did what exactly what he was supposed to do. It is very hard for me to accept that 59 year old dude with a cane, has as much responsibility in this situation as man, empowered by law, to carry a gun and arrest people. The argument seems to be that greater power does not actually bring greater responsibility.

I'm very curious as to whether Gates actually made that "Your momma" crack. He is claiming that he did not.

Open Thread At Noon

Go for it folks.

Party Like It's 1995

One interesting aspect of GatesGate is how many of his critics are using the oppurtunity to settle old scores. Here are the criticism of Ishmael Reed, Stanley Crouch and Glenn Loury. I was in school at Howard, when Gates-hatred seemed to be at a fever-pitch.

I never followed the debate too much for a couple reasons. 1.) We had a bad impression of black studies, and generally believed it was a place for English professors who couldn't cut it. Yeah I know, it wasn't fair. 2.) The conversation basically revolved around the Ivy League schools, which was just a different world for us. 3.) I quickly figured out I wouldn't be able to cut it in academia.

I'm not in any real position to weigh in on the old feuds, and what Gates has done or hasn't. I've never read any of his books. And I've never finished any of his documentaries. For the most part, I try to avoid generalists. So rather than check out what an Af-Am lit cat has to say about African history, I'm probably going to check out an actual Africanist. I also love a good story. So rather than watch celebs untangle their lineage, I'm going to spend my time with a narrative that has some bite.

That said, there's a lot of juice and back story here. I find it fascinating that Glenn Loury, former black conservative, has the following to say about Gates:

I find laughable, and sad, Professor Gates's declaration that he now plans to make a documentary film about racial profiling. Is that as far as his scholarship on the intersection of race and policing in America extends? Where has this eminent scholar of African-American affairs been these last 30 years, during which a historically unprecedented, politically popular, extraordinarily punitive and hugely racially disparate mobilization of resources for the policing, imprisonment and post-release supervision of those caught up in the criminal justice system has unfolded?

I find it hilarious, as Adam says, that Stanley Crouch is lecturing Gates on belligerance. I mean seriously, dude?

Ambushing The Birthers

I'm generally not a fan of these sorts of videos--you can never tell what they mean, because you don't have much context. What percentage of GOP congressmen actually are scared of the birthers? Is media just honing in on a few? You can't really tell.

That being said, watching a dude sprint away from the reporter was interesting. More interesting was the dude at the end who stood his ground, slammed Obama, and then said he was clearly born in Hawaii and clearly a citizen.

I'm tempted to say that this is the sort of issue that creates a lot of noise, but actually doesn't have much of a following. But measuring it against the contraction in GOP party ID, you can't really be sure.

What's A Lefty To Do?

Had to laugh at this one from adamvillani, deep in the football thread:

Aww man, football fans have TNC, basketball fans have Yglesias, but for political commentators we baseball fans got stuck with George Will.

For the record it looks like a fantasy league is out. I should have known it wouldn't work. In my head, I always see this blog as a conversation between me and like 20 other people. It's obviously a lot more than that, but it rarely occurs to me that there actually are a lot of people reading. Tomorrow we'll discuss what form we should take--with pick 'em and salary cap being the two obvious options.

Vick's Back

There it is. Early Kordell Stewart pt. 2, methinks.

The Root Flooded With Racist Comments

I'm not sure that anyone is surprised. One interesting aspect of all this is how media is now using Gates-Gate to show that we're not postracial. But the only people I ever heard claiming that we were post-racial were cable news hosts setting up the strawman.

Save The Children

D-Sel makes the point that Vernon Forrest's kid was in the car when these disgusting thugs tried to carjack him. That explains a lot about his aggressive response. The worst part of these sorts of incidents is you see yourself in them. People who make threats, in the presence of your child, will turn you into a different person.

This, for me, has always been a scary thought.

A few years back, I took my son to see Howl's Moving Castle down at Lincoln Square. There was a big crowd coming out, and trying to move down the escalators. My son, all of four at the time, was a little slow getting off, and an exasperated woman pushed him. You can imagine how it went from there.

The worst part, for me, was not the woman putting her hands on Samori, but some random dude who leaped in to defend her. There was a lot going on there. Rightly or wrongly, I think I perceived a racial element--the dude was white, and the woman was white, and here I am on the Upper West Side in a shouting match with her. I think I felt like he was jumping in on some Tarzan saving Jane shit, unaware that I was, from my perspective, trying to protect my son. We exchanged heated words, and as he got closer to me, I shoved him.

I remember him saying "I could have you arrested.' And me replying in very untypical fashion, "Do it, motherfucker."

I swear, I was not in my own head--but that "I could have you arrested" line made me aware of something that I should have been aware of the whole time--there was a four year old black boy watching this whole thing go down. I grabbed him, and took him outside, and we got in a cab.

By then I was no longer angry, I was afraid. I wasn't afraid of the guy, or the cops, I was afraid of myself. I am a fairly mellow guy, with a few pet peeves--people who don't know my child, putting their hands on him is one of them. What scared me was how quickly logic left me--all I wanted was to make this woman know, and then the dude know, that if you touch someone's child you better be prepared for them to touch you. In the crunch, I went back to what I knew--street law.

But street law won't do you much good after age 25 or so. Indeed what once would have protected you, could get you killed. What scared me was how phenomenally stupid I'd been. I know the rules--cop show up and sees this agitated 6'4 black dude who pushed this other guy, what's gonna happen? How is that gonna go? Not well for me, I knew that.

That was the weekend before I was set to start a new job at TIME magazine. I remember thinking how I almost blew it because I couldn't keep my head. When I was reading about Forrest, who was never a thug or a hot-head, I kept wondering why he'd been so aggressive with the carjackers. It's pretty clear to me, now.

A TNC Fantasy Football League?

Seriously, how much interest is there in this?

Open Thread At Noon

All yours...

Speaking Of Stupid

Ahem:

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) will introduce a House resolution on Monday demanding Obama retract and apologize for remarks he has made about Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley this past week.

Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Heh. The GOP is now haunted by birthers. I think this is what happens when you only fulfill half of your duty as a leader. Surely part of it is to represent your folks. But another part of it is to protect them from the mob mentality. But when you actively cultivate Schiavo, "intelligent" design, Confederate Flags, and homophobia, I'm not sure what you expect.

To paraphrase Douglass, a Party is worked on by what they choose to work on. Work on stupid, expect to get stuck there. Expect to have to take meetings with a Russian-born dentist/lawyer about who's American, and who's not.

Vernon Forrest

I remember when he took out Sugar Shane. If I recall Mosley, had just had that great fight with De La Hoya, one of the best I've ever seen. That fight, and the rematch, and then Forrest getting dismantled by Mayorga, and Mayorga getting destroyed by De La Hoya formed this epic circle. Boxing is so much about the match-up.

Forrest is dead, shot after he, apparently, took offense to two carjackers. I'm so tired of hearing this story. I'm so tired of watching brothers go out like this. He leaves behind a son. Seems like they always do.

Put Differently

There are a lot of posts below, not so much agreeing with Chris' point that racist is "close" to nigger as an insult, but seeking to reformulate the argument to make it work.

This is amazing to me. We all have a place where conversation ends, and we begin to doubt that dialogue is actually the answer. The contention that "racist," if unsubstantiated, is close to "nigger" is, I think, mine.

The Holocaust is the epitome of industrialized hate, antisemitism invoked to genocidal ends. Moreover it exists within a shockingly ancient, and shockingly consistent tradition of state-sponsored terrorism against Jews. Hence to be labeled an antisemite is to be placed within one of the most evil, and trenchant, traditions in Western History.

Yet if a Jewish person called me an antisemite--or a Nazi--not because I'd done anything to warrant it, but because they felt like it, I simply can't see myself asserting that that's almost as bad as me calling them a kike, a hook-nosed Jew, money-grubbing Jew, or any other anti-Jewish slur.

If only because I have no sense of the other side, my tongue would be stayed. But more than sheer modesty, I'd understand the difference between attempting to dehumanize someone, to reducing their entire person to the ugliest imagery I can muster, and dishonestly ascribing to them a set of noxious beliefs. One says that you have some dangerous ideas about humanity. The other doubts your relationship to humanity itself.

Moreover, I understand that my status as an antisemite, or Nazi, is up for a debate--even if it's utterly unreasonable, and completely illegitimate. But I would never think that a Jewish's person's status as a "kike" is ever up for debate.

I am, in many ways, a bad fit for this job--there should be a black person here with a gentle-hand, willing to walk people through their differences step by step. There should be someone here who believes in conflict resolution. I have, after many conversations and arguments, concluded that some aspects of understanding are about information. But others are about will--people understand what they want to understand, what they believe is in their interest to understand.

We have--yet again--reached an impasse. I can go no further. I don't even want to.

UPDATE: I think 182 comments is a good place to stop. Lotta heat. Very little light. I think it's worth clearing up a quick note of confusion--this blog never has been, and never will be a "dialogue on race." Indeed, I think such a dialogue is a bad idea. What you get from me is set of observations from a guy who is finding his way through. As a bonus, you get a smart group of commenters.

Either way, this past week has crystallized why I write. I am not here to think for people. I'm not here to respect all opinions. Some ideas about the world deserve honest debate and others deserve scorn. Each person must decide for themselves which is which. Even as I am aware of my own limits, I will not hesitate to make the choice. We can't talk our way out of everything.

...And Then I Read This

Chris thinks Gates that by calling the officer a racist, Gates bears some of the responsibility for the incident. He goes a bit further in responding to an e-mail:

In my mind there is no equivalency here, but the reader does raise a good point: there is, and never will be, a white equivalent to the N-word, but "racist" - when unsubstantiated - comes close.

Chris is good dude, and a smart writer. But I think, even in its hedged, qualified form, this is quite wrong. I think we'd all agree that if my spouse gets mad and calls me a sexist, and I fire back by calling her a bitch, I've gone somewhere else. I think we'd agree that if a gay person, without proof, calls me a homophobe, and I fire back by calling him a fag, I've ventured into another league. We are not "close" in terms of the level of our offense. The question then becomes, why is it different for "racist"?

My only answer is that it's because we, again, equate racist with "immoral." Michael Jackson once called Tommy Moottola, a racist. From what I know, it was unsubstantiated. The only way I can close the space between that, and Mottola, say, calling Jackson a nigger, is to think of racist as the equivalent of rapist, or child-molestor.

Again, I think this makes sense, if you believe racism to be the province of societal pariahs, not people who hawk their wares on MSNBC. But if you believe that we live with it every day, that the worst part of racism is how it hides in the hearts of otherwise decent people, than this is rather puzzling. If you've had friends who've looked you in the eye, and said something racist, you may feel differently.

This is say nothing of history, obviously. I think when we have black people driving slaves and perpetrating terrorism, when we have the Nation Of Islam hunting Jeff Sessions, all while yelling "Get the racist!" we will be close. When whole blocks start relocating because they suspect a racist has moved into the neighborhood we will be close.

I am sorry guys. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

Oddly, This Made Me Feel Better

I can't think of dude's name, Richard from Sex In The City. He was the man in this--and until he tried to rape a cop. I swear I've run like this before, but I was never the dude to catch wreck like that. Every time I see this I think of Dilated Peoples, "And when I swing my bat don't think I miss like Baseball Fury..."

One thing about the memoir--it really could have used a Baseball Fury reference. What a great name.Weird to see the 72nd street stop, as it was back in the day. Weirder still is how there's this urban mythology that radiated out, pre-internet. By the time I got to Howard, if you'd come up like us, you'd seen The Warriors. You were sure Criminal Minded had altered the curvature of the Earth. You remembered Tyson dispatching fools in minutes. This was the vocab for our lingua franca. These were our signs.

Where It All Leaves Us

It's worth watching Obama's statement. I really can't begrudge him--his priority is health-care. Me, on the other hand, I'm pretty exhausted. What follows is the raw. Not much logic. Just some thoughts on how it feels.

I feel pretty stupid for going hard on this, and stupider for defending what Obama won't really defend himself. I should have left it at one post. Evidently Obama, Crowley and Gates are talking about getting a beer together. I hope they have a grand old time.

The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started. I can't explain why, but this is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your own precarious citizenship. I mean, the end of all of this scares the hell out of me.

I was thinking earlier this week about the connection between all of this and the Senate almost passing a bill which would make it legal to carry a concealed weapon in any state, as long as your home state approves. Maybe there is no line between to the two, or maybe I just haven't connected them yet.

In his book Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson talks about citizens accepting the responsibility for democracy. He's discussing red-lining, as I recall, and notes that it would be wrong to see government policy toward black neighborhoods as a shadowy conspiracy to destroy black communities. It's much darker than that. The government represents the people, and thus one must see red-lining, housing segregation, and housing covenants not as the machinations of bureaucrats, but as a manifestation of popular will. My reading on Reconstruction has led me the same way. Rutherford B. Hays did not so much fail, as the country made a choice--we'd rather kill Indians and expand, then protect citizens from terrorism.

When we think about the cops, it's scary, on one level, to conclude that a cop can basically arrest you on a whim. It's scarier still to think that this is what Americans want, that this country is as we've made it. And then finally it's even scarier to understand that no president can change that. It's not why he's there. He is there to pass health-reform--not make us post-racist, or post-police power, or post-whatever. Only the people can do that. And they don't seem particularly inclined. Here is what the election of Barack Obama says about race--white people, in general, are willing to hire a black guy for the ultimate job. That's a big step. But it isn't any more than what it says.

I hope Crowley, Gates and Obama get that beer soon. They need to pour out a little something for Shem Walker. We can't all go to Harvard.

I have been talking too much lately. I need to get back to the Civil War...

Sorry Redskins Fans

I was reminiscing in a thread earlier this week about watching Eric Allen return an interception and then hand the ball to Randall Cunningham, who was watching the whole thing from the tunnel, on crutches and out for the season. In comments we started talking about what that moment meant. It's weird to say your writing is inspired by football, but mine certainly is. If ever I could get my intensity up to that Ray Lewis level, I think I could do a lot more.

But I look at football as art--it is the only reality television that actually interest me. Sometimes when I watch old plays, like this one below, I actually applaud like I've seen the last act of a great play. Deniro has nothing on Gayle Sayers, or Primetime. Back in 92, I watched the Cowboys play the 49ers in the championship game. It was the only moment when my team was actually better than I thought they were. I was pretty sure they'd lose to the 49ers, especially after Steve Young led his team to score late in the 4th.

And then I watched Troy Aikman drop back and hit Alvin Harper across the middle. Harper ran like 70 yards, and I swear I heard the back of the entire 49er organization break. For a kid who's second year as a Cowboys fan ended with "The Catch," this was religious. The Cowboys went on to win, and then become the team of the 90s.

We think about sports, too much, in terms of trash-talk. Your team wins, and you get to tell all your friends how much they suck. Yeah that's cool, but I never got into it for that. There's something deeper--I watch for that transcendental moment when your sure something can't happen, and then, goddamit, it does. It's an incredible feeling. Even when your on the other end.

The tragedy, and the glory, of the NFL is that it happens just about every week. Remember the River City Relay? So many of these moments aren't accessible, and are lost away in the NFL's vaults. Maybe one day they'll put it all online. I'd pay serious money for access.

UPDATE: Sorry it wasn't clear, this isn't Aikman to Harper. It's the last play in a Redskins v. Cowboys game from a decade ago.

One other thing, please save the shit-talk. The season's coming soon enough--and there's an open thread below. And there are football sites across the web. Visit them and have at it.

The Gnomish Wind...

Word is that Sam Rami is directing the new Warcraft movie. I guess that means the studio execs didn't like my sample script. Whatever. Good luck finding an auteur who can film like this...

Cambridge Cops Press Conference

Here you go...

UPDATE: Good god. The union guy just said that when Gates didn't cooperate, the officer was fully within his rights to make the arrest. That is incredible.

UPDATE #2: Video was live. I'll put up another soon as it's archived.

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Open Thread At Noon

Everything non-Gates related. It's yours.

The Rage Of A Privileged Class

I don't think I've ever seen Harold Ford this animated, and I think I know why. I want to go back to something I said yesterday--There are a class of black people who understand that this sort of thing happens, and believe race is an aggravating factor. They get pissed off about this sort of thing, but at the same time, position it within their expectations of cops.

And then there are a class of black people, who like other highly accomplished people, have higher expectations, for how the police treat all people, but specifically for how cops treat them. I think it's important to remember, when you hear Barack Obama doubling down on this, exactly what world of black people he's rolling with. It's worth understanding, specifically, the world of Valarie Jarrett. It's worth understanding that Harold Ford isn't just a black guy, he's the scion of a southern political dynasty. This isn't Good Times. Or the Coates family. (Though we are on our way up, Negroes. Hide your debutantes, and guard your grill.)

There's a way of doing this analysis as a criticism--i.e. they only care because it's Gates. Surely class plays a role, but I think seeing it that way is as reductive as a strict race analysis. I also don't want to slip into any lazy-ass bashing of the black upper-middle class. I've got no beef with Jack & Jill. Living in Harlem, I probably wouldn't do it. But if I lived in Colorado, I may well feel different.

Lastly, it's interesting that Mike Barnicle can't acknowledge that this guy made a stupid bust. The whole panel has basically given up the racial profiling theory. But Barnicle can't move an inch. That may be generational. Or ethnic. Or geographical. Or just human.

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Don't Be The Next Contestant On That Summer-Jam Screen

I know there are people out there feeding this idea that Palin is a formidable presidential opponent. They are delusional:

Perhaps more vexing for Palin's national political aspirations, however, is that 57 percent of Americans say she does not understand complex issues, while 37 percent think she does, a nine-percentage-point drop from a poll conducted in September just before her debate with now-Vice President Biden. The biggest decline on the question came among Republicans, nearly four in 10 of whom now say she does not understand complex issues. That figure is 70 percent among Democrats and 58 percent among independents.

When 40 percent of your base thinks you don't understand the issues, I think you'll have trouble getting out of the primary. She should not run. She should take the family time, she claimed to be so interested in.

What people quickly forget is that Palin hasn't actually done top-billing on a national campaign. The cold light of constant media attention and debates will be brutal. I guess she could, somehow, make it out the primary. But that would be a statement on the truly fallen state of the GOP.

A Little Perspective, Please

Conor Friedersdorf making sense:

I understand, of course, that Pres. Obama was asked about Henry Louis Gates, which is also part of the problem. Wrongly arrest a black men who happens to be a Harvard professor, release him without filing charges, and the national press corps asks the president to comment. Wrongly imprison for years on end a black man who happens to be working class and without celebrity, and the national press corps continues to utterly ignore a criminal justice system that routinely convicts innocent people. Apportioning blame for this sorry state of affairs isn't as important as recognizing that the news we get on these matters reflects a value system that is seriously flawed, and that news consumers bear blame for too.

Read the whole post. And then after you do that read The Agitator. Every day. I don't link there enough. That's on me.

Ogletree On Gates

It's worth watching this. Note Ogletree's refusal to take the racial profiling bait, and his refusal to attack the witness. Smart play. He sounded sharp all around.

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Stop Telling Me About The Racial-Profiling Course

I don't care if the dude tried to take a bullet for Malcolm in the ballroom, and ran guns for Huey P. Either it's smart to arrest a dude for being rude to a cop in his own house, or it isn't.

And progressives who want to argue that this is clearly a case of racial profiling need to stop it too. You don't know. You don't help us by acting like you do.

Clarification On The Woman Who Called The Cops

She is not--I repeat NOT--a neighbor:

A witness, 40-year-old Lucia Whalen of Malden, had alerted the cops that a man was "wedging his shoulder into the front door" at Gates' house "as to pry the door open," police reported.

Now, we can all agree that she was not at fault to call the cops. But it is erroneous to say it was "neighbor." It was someone who, apparently, works in the neighborhood.

So Exactly When Would You Call The Cops?

This came up yesterday an e-mail exchange with a friend. I noted that had I seen what the woman who called the cops on Gates claims to have seen, I would not have called. It's important to highlight the fact that Gates, and the woman, don't know each other. That said, it's understandable that she called the police. It's what people who have confidence in the police do.

I don't know how much confidence I have in the cops. But generally, unless I am sure I've witnessed a crime, I'm not calling the cops. I called them last year because some fool chained a rottweiler to the fence of a local playground, and then left. I would call them if I saw a mugging or a shooting. I probably would not call them if I saw a drug deal. And I probably would not answer any questions about any drug deal I may have thought I saw.

I think the source of a lot my reasoning is the cop's own response to Gates. A lot of us here believe that is possible that Gates was, at least, rude. We also aren't sure what--if any--role race played in all this. That said, the cop not only thinks Gates was rude to him but he handled the situation exactly right. Given that dude thinks police should be arresting citizens for rudeness, he is not the guy I'd want dealing with the kids in my neighborhood--even the ones who need to be in custody.

My basic perspective is that cops are men (or women) with guns and the legal right to shoot you, without the usual repercussions. I tend to use a lot of discretion when it comes to introducing that kind of element into a situation. It's just no way to tell how things will go down.

I don't say this as a statement of policy or advice. I think it's perfectly sensible to call the cops because you suspect a burglary. My history is my own. It's taught me something different.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this in my post, but this is the sort of thing that influences my thinking. Guy calls the police and claims a cop got shot. Police descend on the neighborhood, and catch a guy who they think is the suspect. They beat the hell out of him right there on the spot. But it turns out the guy catching the beat-down is a cop. Furthermore, it turns out now cop was shot at all. The caller lied. There'd been a murder but he/she didn't believe the police would show unless it was a cop murder. There were no charges filed. The officers are still on the force. I want as little to do with that as possible.

Open Thread At Noon

Go to it, guys.

Cops And Pension

This comment yesterday from Cynic didn't get enough attention. I don't know enough to weigh in, really, but I did find it's argument intriguing. I'd love to hear from some of my betters on this:

What we need is pension reform, and re-structured compensation.
No, seriously. One of the barriers to effective discipline on most police forces is that when cops sign up for the job, they believe they're making a bargain - twenty years of mediocre pay, long hours, and often dangerous working conditions, in exchange for a pension while they're still middle-aged. So it's not just about the thin blue line, about solidarity and camaraderie, about the brotherhood of people under fire - though all of those things are crucial. It's also that taking an officer, particularly a veteran officer getting close to that pension, and throwing him out onto civvie street taps into every officer's worst fear. "I could screw up, make a single mistake, and throw away everything I've worked for," they think.
This is bad news, all around. It means that instead of a force comprised of people doing their jobs because it's what they want to be doing, or at least the best available option, we often end up with police forces stocked with officers trying to "put in their twenty." It means that people who decide they're unsuited for the life, or simply can't take it any more, still try to stick it out. And it means that even when supervisors decide that an officer shouldn't be out on the streets, that they don't have the temperament or judgment to be a good cop, they're more likely to try to transfer them to some other unit than to see them dismissed from the force. It's not a problem that's unique to police forces, either. Other public-sector employees suffer from similarly warped incentives - public school teachers leap to mind as the prime example. Trapping people in their jobs, and raising the perceived costs of dismissing them from their jobs, is bad policy.
Which is not to downplay the importance of good oversight, of community review, of reform, of internal affairs, or of any of the myriad other checks and balances for which advocates continually press. But the simplest way to encourage the dismissal of those poorly-equipped to handle the responsibilities of police work from the force is to lower the perceived cost of that dismissal. That means paying cops more up front, and less later on. Or, if that's too tough to put into place, shifting them from pensions over to 457 plans, in which they receive annual retirement payments from the city that are fully portable, and can be taken with them and funneled into a 401(k) after a short vesting period. Little changes, big impacts.

Jon Stewart On Birthers

While I'm at it, I have not linked to Dave Weigel, which is a tragedy. One point that Dave makes, which I don't think people appreciate, is that the whole birther thing is the direct result of Obama trying to dispel rumors that his middle name was Muhammad. This notion that rational argument and evidence will convince people who believe that Obama has benefited from a massive conspiracy is faulty. They aren't actually interested in evidence. I'm sure, somewhere, there are people still looking for that whitey tape.

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Gatesgate

I was not so much surprised by Obama's answer, as I was by his thinly-veiled anger. Anger may not be the right word, perhaps "perturbed." After thinking about, I should not have been. Obama's been pissed off before in public interactions.

Moreover, for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class black people even more than it angers anyone else, because they tend to be individuals who, by society's lights, are very accomplished. They deeply resent being lumped in with the mass. And more than anyone they resent the whole "when you're black, you talk to the police like this" routine. Obama has lived as a member of that class for a large portion of his adult life, or he's had some concentrated exposure to it--the black strivers roll deep on the South Side. It's not shocking that he was pissed.

One other thing. I'm already seeing stories where reporters are shocked--shocked!--that a guy who thinks that fathers matter, and that kids should be told "no excuses" by their parents, actually would be disturbed by the Gates' arrest. It's the stupidity of dichotomy. Two ideas can't occupy the same brother's brain at the same time. It's against the laws of press coverage.

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Incredible

Read this story. (h/t to comments) And then consider that this is the upshot:

The District Attorney's Office reviewed the case and declined to prosecute Officer Lopez in December. Eight days later, he was reissued his weapon and returned to full duty.

Incredible. I think one point that my white readers have made is starting to get some traction with me. Race is an aggravating factor when you talk about police brutality. But there is something deeper here. Something about cops and how absolute power, and the lack of repercussions, corrupts people.

Read the story. If there were no video, you wouldn't even know about it.

One question constantly nags at me. I understand why a lot of these guys can't be tried for murder. But why the fuck aren't they fired? Where is the basic, "You know we understand it was a mistake. We understand you've been under pressure, and this is a really hard job. We just think you probably aren't cut out to walk the streets with a gun and a badge."

There's no disgrace in that. Everyone can't be a cop.

Put Words Together Like Letterman

Oh my god. The Electric Company is on Hulu...

Giving Them More Rope

I don't know if the way Barack Obama repeatedly Terri Schiavos the GOP is conscious, or not, but I think it's brilliant. I think if you want an example of what I'm talking about, look at this Liz Cheney rant, where--as James Carville astutely points out--Cheney can not come out and say that she believes Barack Obama was born in America.

Obama does not so much drive right-wingers crazy, as he drives they extreme right wingers crazy. But here's the the thing--so many of the respectable one have fed the "Proud to Ignorant" line to their audience so long, that they can't say, "OK guys, it's time to be serious." Barack Obama takes the nuttiest wing of the GOP and then plasters the entire party with it. Maybe it's more correct to say they plaster themselves with it, I don't know. But if you look at Mike Castle's inability to control that crowd, there's a line from that incident, to the inability to talk honestly about Rush. The upshot is that people like Liz Cheney end up having to defend crazies.

It's like the old Martin Luther King Jr. trick. Do something really simple, like walk across the street, but do it a really dignified manner (a suit helps) and then watch your enemies go wild with opposition. Think Sonia Sotomayor, and then re-watch that Pat Buchanan rant. I'd maintain that Pat caught the worst of that one. And then think about Rev. Wright, and how Obama cut him off--and barely broke stride.

They need their crazies. Either that, or they are stupid enough to believe that the birthers are America.

Jeff Goldberg Gets The Scoop On Conde Nast

I think the New Yorker's in trouble.

UPDATE: It's a joke guys. Soon we will be reduced to emoticons :(

Open Thread At Noon

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare,
I had to cram so many things to store, everything in there...

On Gates

It needs to be said that, though I casually threw it out there, I really have no clue whether race played a role in Gates' arrest. It's important to say that. I don't know what I would have done if I were in shoes, but I don't know that I'd assumed race. I think the decision to arrest a guy for, at worst, being rude in his own house is shockingly stupid. The thought of someone like that carrying the power of life and death is mind-boggling.

That said, the wind is leaving my sails over this one and I'm not sure why. I keep getting this "doth protest too much" vibe every time I read Gates's interviews. It's interesting that it took his own arrest for Gates to decide to make a doc about this. Maybe he's had a Come To Jesus moment. Who can know? Who can really know?

I'm much more concerned over Shem Walker's family. The dude was killed for doing what a lot of us would do if we saw some fool hanging out on our mother's porch. And the taxpayers will most certainly be held to account for it. I don't want people like that holstering guns around my kids.

UPDATE: Also, one wonders how much of this has to do with the local politics of Cambridge and Harvard. I wonder how much the tensions that often exist between an Ivy League school, and its surrounding community was at work. I don't know enough about Cambridge to say...

Clarifications On Yesterday

This blog is very internal, and thus, necessarily, somewhat confused--and sometimes confusing. It's important to clarify the difference between being troubled in a bad way ("I can't pay my rent") and troubled in a good way ("Am I really pushing hard enough?"). Having experienced both, I'm clear on the difference.

But yesterday was a great day--that's why I started the post talking about religious experiences, and not about owing money on my taxes. I don't think of being "troubled" or feeling "challenged" as bad things. They're invigorating. I'm happy I've been up since "ever since"--it means the neurons are really firing.

There's nothing "down" about that. I feel really stupid for explaining this. I probably should have left it be. There's a difference between being happy and being comfortable. I greatly value the former, and hope to, by and by, devalue the latter.

Taking My Self Way Too Seriously

Like a lot of people, I'm not very religious. Which isn't the same as saying I'm immune to the religious experience. Playing the djimbe, when I was a kid, was about as close to God as I'll ever get. I once saw Randall Cunningham's most promising season ended by Bryce Paup. Later in that game Eric Allen picked off a pass, zig-zagged his way some 90 yards, through the end-zone, and then into the tunnel where, standing on crutches, Randall Cunningham was waiting. Allen handed Cunningham the ball, and I thought then, there might be a God.

I went to the Met yesterday, the boy likes to draw, so we've put him in a class there. I've been several times before, indeed we have a family membership. And yet somehow, I'm never prepared for the raw power of the place. Samori went up with the kids to sketch in the modern art gallery. I meandered around until I came to a gift shop. I bought a bookmark shaped like a lyre for $8.99. This would test my maturity. I'm always losing bookmarks. I resolved to have my manhood judged by how long I can hang on to this one.

I found my way down to the sculpture garden and circled The Burghers Of Calais a few times. It's funny to know something is beautiful, and not know why. I think it's the incredible detail--but that doesn't really say much. I don't want to go to Paris without being fluent in French. But son, I really need to see those hands.

I sat for a minute, insecure, because everyone else sitting was sketching and I can't draw a lick, and for some reason, I think I should be able to. I took some notes on my recent thoughts about the Civil War and the diversity of slavery and then set off, like Langston (and apparently some dude named Jacob Niles.), to wonder as I wandered.

I stopped in front of a color pencil drawing of two women smiling over a small cake. According to the description, the women were strangers. Some guy stopped next to me and took me for an artist. I think it was my gutter style--hoodie and Air Force ones, but perhaps not, since he introduced himself as an artist too. He was wearing a three-piece suit. I told him I did not have the gift, and he shook his head. "Just get some pencils and put some stuff down man."

This struck me.

It's exactly what I tell people when they say things like, "I wish I could write." or "I wish I had the gift to write." In my mind there is no gift--there is a considerable amount of labor, but I don't have much interest in talking about talent. There are a lot of talented niggers on the corner, in jail, under early tombstones. That's what my mother used to say.

The rest of my day was troubled. I logged into Warcraft five times and didn't stay longer than ten minutes. I couldn't sit still. I was pacing the house. I was convinced that I'd recently wasted a large sum of money. I walked outside that evening and took the bus to Morning Side Heights and sat in that cafe where, I'm convinced, all writers eventually go. The place is beautiful and cliche.

I can't go to the Met without getting this overpowering feeling that I've wiled away too much of my brief life. You look at the Burghers and wonder how much care that took. How hard he must have worked. And you wonder if you'll ever be so fortunate as to work that hard at anything. I got up at three this morning and worked on some writing about DOOM. I have been up ever since.

The Limits Of Our Dialogue On Race And Beyond

"The New Girl" is the single best episode that I've seen of Mad Men. It follows Don Draper's descent into self-destruction, as he extends his affair with Bobbi Barrett, and ends up in a drunken car wreck. There are so many great lines in that one. Bobbi is querying a poker-faced Don, and trying to get him to reveal something. She asks him what he wants, and Don responds, The answer is huge. Not big, not enormous, not great--but huge. This is, to me, an incredibly precise use of the human language. That line says so much to me. One day I'll explain.

But for our purposes, the relevant scene takes place much later--after Peggy Olsen has rescued Don and Bobbi from the police station, and is in the midst of a cover-up. Don is an unrepentant sexist. He once almost refused to talk to a client, because she was a woman and spoke out of her place. But he has a special, almost father-daughter, connection with Peggy--one that stands in contrast with his tense relationship with Pete Campbell. You'd think Don would favor Pete, as a fellow member of the good-old-boys network. But then you'd be writing theory. You wouldn't be writing about people. You wouldn't be writing stories.

Throughout the episode Bobbi wonders why Peggy is covering for Don. She isn't in love with him. She's not his secretary. What is she getting out of it? We (but not Bobbi) are given the answer in flashback--Peggy ended last season in labor, having a baby, after not even knowing she was pregnant. She'd just been promoted and become the first woman copywriter at the agency since the War. In the flashback we see she's been committed, and it seems no one can reach her. Don, having done some detective work, tracks her to the hospital. He then pulls from his own tangled history, and heals her. He is not kind. He is not loving. He is not "good." He is as sarcastic and cold as ever. But he tells her the truth that she needs to hear:

Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.

This is not good advice for being a better person. But Peggy doesn't want to be a better person. She wants to be equal. Equality, for her, is the right to be as craven, as ambitious, and power-hungry as any man. In that business, forgetting is essential. Don is a sexist. But his sexism is not the end of his humanity. His humanity relates to Peggy, as someone on the come-up. His humanity allows him to dismiss women as a class, and yet respect Peggy's ambition, even become the primary agent of it. Consider that here you have a sexist, unwittingly striking a blow against sexism.

This is not unfamiliar to me. If you had to quantify how many men are actually sexist, no number would really shock me. I'd argue with 100 percent. But I'm a man who when passed by an attractive woman on the street has to consciously think, "Dude, don't leer at that chick's ass." It doesn't always work. I'd argue with 100 percent, but not with any real certainty.

If you had to quantify the number of heterosexuals who were homophobic, I'd argue against 100 percent, also. But I'm a man who had to learn my way out of the word "fag"--it took years, not months, to get right. I'd argue, but not with any real certainty.

If you told me that 100 percent of the Boule, the Links and Jack and Jill look down on lower-class black folks, indeed, believe that they deserve to be where they are, I'd argue. But I'm a man who still laughs at "Niggers vs. Black people. And Jack And Jill can spot my ghetto-ass a mile away. I'd argue, but not because I took offense.

When you're not on the business end of an -ism, it's always easy to underestimate the malice of its employers. When you're a part of that class of employers, it becomes even easier.

Continue reading "The Limits Of Our Dialogue On Race And Beyond" »

Open Thread At Noon

Go for it...

Race In 2028

I don't much like talking about Affirmative Action, mostly because I don't actually know what it is. Like a lot of people, I thought the Ricci case was Affirmative Action. It actually isn't--it's an Equal Protection case. (I think) More than that, I have no sense of its scope. What is its scale? How many blacks actually benefit from Affirmative Action? How many whites suffer? How large of public policy is this?

Lastly, and maybe most damningly, I am human, and black too. I am plush with my own prejudices. My sympathies are, rightly or wrongly, not so much with the kid who can't get into Harvard, and must settle for Brown, or even Maryland, but with the kids I went to middle school with. The ones who, I hope, made it into community college.

That said, you can't really escape the debate. It's all around us. Ross is interested in, not really debating whether we should have Affirmative Action now, but whether we should have it two decades from now:

But the senators are yesterday's men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.
The nation's largest states, Texas and California, already have "minority" majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites -- black, Hispanic and Asian -- will constitute a majority of Americans under 18.By 2042, they'll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, "every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation."
As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.
A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians -- and a source of permanent grievance among America's shrinking white population.

I think a few things.

1.)I suspect you will get class-based AA well before 2028.

2.) The states Ross highlighted--Texas and Cali--are ahead of his column. They outlawed Affirmative Action years ago.

3.) I am semi-skeptical of demography which predicts the coming white minority.Whiteness has proven to be an amazingly protean concept, absorbing whole groups that it once shunned. It's not clear to me that Latinos, or at least some Latinos, can't be absorbed too. I'd suggest a middle ground. Some Latinos absorbed. Some not. How that breaks down, I don't know. But I think the notion that all Latinos, in 2028, will be nonwhite is flawed. As I recall, the majority of Latinos, right now, check "White" when asked about race. It's been suggested to me that that says more about the census forms, then about Latinos. Maybe.

The only group whiteness has proven incapable of absorbing are blacks. This makes sense. In America, whiteness doesn't depend on Italians, Jews, Asians or Latinos--it depends on blacks. The whole point of the Civil War wasn't simply to protect slavery, but to protect a kind of "nobility for the masses." As long as blacks remained a bonded class, white people--slave holders or not--always had a peasantry beneath their feet. To be white was to have the latest Jordans. If everyone had Jordans, they'd be pro-Keds.

Continue reading "Race In 2028" »

The Cowboys Pick Up A Receiver

From a reality show:

Ever since Michael Irvin retired, he's been hearing that the Dallas Cowboys could use another receiver like him.
Irvin believes he's delivering that guy to them.
Jesse Holley -- a tall, flamboyant receiver with a great smile and plenty of charisma -- was revealed Monday night as the winner of "4th and Long," the reality TV show on Spike that was organized and hosted by the Hall of Famer.
Holley's prize is the 80th spot on the Cowboys' training-camp roster and a standard rookie contract. However, with Terrell Owens gone and few proven receivers left, Irvin believes the 25-year-old Holley could be more than just a practice body.

Skip Gates Arrested For Breaking And Entering...

...in his own house. Incredible:

Police arrived at Gates's Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had locked himself out of his house and was trying to get inside.
He was booked for disorderly conduct after "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior," according to the Cambridge police log.
He was booked for disorderly conduct after "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior," according to the Cambridge police log.
Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver's license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

I bet he did exhibit "loud and tumultuous behavior." I likely would too. Actually, I wouldn't. But I don't work for Harvard. And my mother taught me how black men are to address the police.

Dig the word from his boy:

[S. Allen] Counter has faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.
"This is very disturbing that this could happen to anyone, and not just to a person of such distinction," Counter said. "He was just shocked that this had happened, at 12:44 in the afternoon, in broad daylight. It brings up the question of whether black males are being targeted by Cambridge police for harassment."

Of course not. That would be racism! Committed by racists!! Real-live racists!! In Cambridge!

Gamesmanship

Here I am with Will Wright, talking about game-making, out at the Aspen Ideas Fest. Considering, I first played SimCity when I was, like, 15, this was awesome-sauce.

Not so awesome-sauce, is realizing that I'm wearing the same young-ass sweater I wore for this other ATL video. If this was 91, fools would have jokes for days. What did Chris Rock say? You better take your ass to Banana Republic...

Community

Last week, Sorn commented on a hastily written post I made about Obama, the media, and the NAACP. I thought that comment was great, and highlighted it. The Guardian agreed. This is high praise for Sorn in particular, but for the assembled commentariat here, in particular. I do what I can to create the conditions for thinking out loud. But you guys bring the thinking.

Here is something else: Institutions are essential. But to me, writing, and the tools it depends upon (creativity, intelligence etc.), belongs to the people, not the institutions they create.

The power of blogging is that it takes back writing, it takes back public thinking, it seizes it from the bishops and archons and gives it to the people. It is the bane of credentialism. We just need more people to take up the fight in earnest. Grab your shield. Let's go.

Open Thread At Noon

Just off of a plane, so I'm a little slow here. Take it away folks.

Frank Rich Gets It

Heh, on the Ancien Regime:

Among Sotomayor's questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of '94. They -- along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists -- set the Republicans' tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had "a temperament problem" and advised that "maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection." That's the crux of the '94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn't for Graham.

Read the column. It's pretty damn good.

Obama, Cosbyism and Black Nationalism

A conversation below, and this comment from Johnathan, made me think I should post a link from my Cosby story. Here's the comment:

Well it's a conversation that's been going on forever but whites have long clung to the more controversial elements of it. Few white people - and none in the commentariat that I'm aware of - talk about the NOI's attempts to inspire self-respect, dress code, clean living. Now I have my own problems with the NOI (corruption, abuse, criminal ties) but that's neither here nor there. So many movements that were reduced to "anti white" or "anti semitic", "reverse racist" or what have you when often the focus was equally if not moreso focused on self-betterment. Now with Cosby you have a man who has a totally nonthreatening public persona, just using the soapbox to shake his fist at the kids and white folks applaud like crazy. They couldn't applaud for Malcolm, though...

I think this is a great point. There actually is a very long tradition of "social conservatism/moral reformism" among black people stretching back to slavery. This cat Christopher Allen Bracey calls it "Organic Black Conservatism" as opposed to, say, Think Tank Black Conservatism. Think Cedric The Entertainer in Barbershop, not Thomas Sowell.

Continue reading "Obama, Cosbyism and Black Nationalism " »

Awesome Emerson

I read Self-Reliance in my college American lit class. Talk about dropping jewels:

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

That right there--names and customs--convinced me to drop out of school. Weirdly enough, in preparation for Kenyatta's return to school, we're re-reading the essay:

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

Sorry, it's a little early for this, I know.

Now I'm Not Racist...

One cool thing about the Obama presidency is, far from leading us into a postracial America, it's actually revealing that significant minority of white folks, (35-40 percent? Too optimistic?) who are not racist, but just really really don't like ~~black people~~ Al Sharpton. Take this latest installment in what is, basically, a weekly drama:

In the past several months Atwater City Councilman Gary Frago has sent at least a half-dozen e-mails to city staff and other prominent community members containing racist jokes aimed at President Barack Obama, his wife and black people in general...

Some compared Obama to O.J. Simpson while others suggested that "nigger rigs" should now be called "presidential solutions."
Perhaps the most overboard e-mail was sent on Jan. 15. It read: "Breaking News Playboy just offered Sarah Palin $1 million to pose nude in the January issue. Michelle Obama got the same offer from National Geographic."
Frago admitted sending the e-mails, but showed no regret. "If they're from me, then I sent them," he said. "I have no disrespect for the president or anybody, they weren't meant in any bad way or harm."

More:

Rieger said the jokes he sent had no racial meaning. "As far as I'm concerned the e-mails need no explanation," he said. "I sent them out, I'm not concerned with it," he said.
Rieger also said he had no idea what Frago's constituents might think of the e-mails. "I'm sure if I was black I'd have a different idea of what was funny," he said. "I got black friends that I would tell these jokes to and they would roll on the floor in laughter."

And of the course the predictable finale:

Rieger said that he is not a racist.

Right. Because there are no racists. Ever. Anywhere.

UPDATE: Link added. Sorry guys.

UPDATE #2: Closing comments. I should have done this two days ago. I try to keep this place, pretty open and candid, with the understanding that we're all going to listen, that we're all going to make an attempt at self-reflection. I don't think there's much of that happening here.

But more to the point, from the notion that racists are a marginalized class, to the sense one can draw conclusions about millions of people based on encounters in one city, to the idea that this post is, itself, racist, there is a considerable amount of willful ignorance below.

Willful ignorance is my line--it is the burden of the willfully ignorant. It is their dirty laundry. This is not where you come to get clean.

And Now For Healthcare

If you're like me, and don't know much about the Healthcare debate, it's worth spending some time with this Fresh Air interview. The guest is Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor over at TNR. Check out his blog. He actually makes this shit sound like English.

Some More Good Words On Obama

From Adam:

The President's message was far more nuanced -- and far more reflective of mainstream black opinion -- than media narratives about race ever seem to acknowledge: that while black people still feel the sting of racism, none of us see ourselves as victims incapable of improving our circumstances. Obama wasn't wagging his finger. When he said that "all these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children," he was stating the obvious. That's why everyone cheered. But if the President actually believed that all that was required was a stronger grip on our bootstraps, he wouldn't be pushing health care reform.
The dominant storyline from the NAACP speech is "no excuses," because that message makes so many Americans feel as though their obligations to deal with intolerance and bigotry have been met, because it soothes the white guilt of those who would like to prefer not to see black problems as "American problems." But if that's all people took away from the president's speech, they simply weren't listening.

Open Thread At Noon

Kick the ballistics, G...

From The Day I Was Born And Given Life...

Woke up this morning banging Black Uhuru. Man these cats got me through high school. Back when I used to rock the Bob Marley, Uprising tee-shirt, and those pitiful baby-dreads. Michael Rose has the sickest voice. I was always a roots sorta dude. Everybody went to dance-hall, though. But what Mike say? It's a time for every style...

Black Uhuru Anthem - Black Uhuru

If You Got A Racist Mind

I got a lot of notes about Pat Buchanan's rantings last night on MSNBC. I think the most revealing portion of his blathering is the that contention that no black people died at Vicksburg. My favorite comment on those mythical black soldiers who didn't die during the Vicksburg campaign comes from Southern diarist Kate Stone. She's reporting on the battle of Milliken's Bend:

It is hard to believe that Southern soldiers--and Texans at that--have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white and black Yankees. There must be some mistake.

What a great line--There must be some mistake. It says so much about the racist mind. And about Buchananism. Seeing him say that, for me, just confirmed that I am on the right path with all of this reading.

You can read up more on Milliken's Bend here. The picture above is a monument to black soldiers that now sits in Vicksburg National Military Park.

Obama's NAACP Speech Extended

I had this long comment I was going to make, but then I saw this beautiful note from Sorn, that says everything I wanted to say.

Why he's in church. I mean, not sitting in the pew, but the President's in church. This isn't the speech you give to people to convince a hostile crowd. This is a speech you give to people who know that they have to face a hostile crowd, but for now they're safe and they need their spirits built up, so tomorrow they can get through the grind again.
I've seen the same theme play out again and again in small churches all over. I've seen Crow Preachers, White Preachers, Cheyenne Preachers, Blackfoot Preachers, Catholic Priests, all give this type of message. I've seen this type of speech at revival tent meetings, and in places where the pews were so plush people were afraid to fart. I've even seen my father give this type of sermon, but that part of my upbringing is another story.
Obama's at the high church of blackness --meaning no offense to anyone-- he knows the drill. The general theme of these speaches is always the same. First make people feel good about themselves and connect them with their history. Then illustrate present problems and dificulties. Step on a few toes and let people know that they can't rest on their laurels. Link the present dificulties to the triumphs of the past. Tell people that if an older generation can over come harder things that they should have no problems overcoming present dificulties. Make a few appeals to personal responsibility. Finally, End with a benediction or a story that links everything together and shows the indomitability of the human spirit.

Continue reading "Obama's NAACP Speech Extended" »

Obama Tells Fellow Blacks--'No Excuses' For Any Failure

That's the New York Times headline on Obama's speech to the NAACP. I don't even know what to say anymore. I haven't heard Obama's speech. But I've seen this play out so many times, that I'm fairly sure what happened. Obama probably said a lot of things, and in the midst of it spent a few minutes on "putting down the Playstation and turning off the Ipod."And then he probably said something about not accepting any excuses from our kids. And thus we have a reductive headline.

Like I said earlier this week--so much of this isn't about Obama himself, but a deep-seated desire to get out from under history. Expiation on the cheap. White guilt isn't anyone's friend. Least of all black people's.

Next Up

Rob Kenner, one of my old editors at VIBE, has a cool blog. Check him out. Found this over at his site--Nas and Damien Marley. Could be interesting.

NAS & DAMIAN "JR GONG" MARLEY DISTANT RELATIVES preview from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Bill Clinton For Gay Marriage

I meant to mention this when it broke. It's sad that so many national politicians become pro-gay marriage, at a point when they can't do anything about it.

Open Thread At Noon

You got it...

Another Police Killing

I think the scariest thing about the victims in all of these accidental cop shootings, is how you see yourself in so many of them. Shem Walker came out on his stoop in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn to find a man sitting on it. He apparently asked the guy to move. The guy didn't respond. Walker apparently tried to move him with physical force. Turns out the guy was a cop. The cop shot and killed Walker.

Clinton Hill isn't what it was in the 80s, but I know the neighborhood, and I could easily see myself in exactly that same situation. The hood consensus, among responsible adults, is that if someone's sitting on your stoop who you don't know, they need to get moving. And quickly. Otherwise, you might find yourself mixed up in someone else's drug bust. It's the same thing when you see kids leaning on your car. They need to keep it moving, less you get tangled up in their business.

What continues to amaze me about these cops, is how they seem to, all at once, lack basic street sense and basic training. Why are you sitting on some dude's stoop, in Clinton Hill, in the first place? With earphones on, no less? You're just asking for beef. Why are you pulling out a gun and shooting someone over a fist fight? You're a cop, for God's sake. Why do you think pulling a gun and saying "Freeze, police!" but not showing any fucking ID, is gonna work? Don't they know that any drug dealer could do the same thing?

I don't understand it.

The War Against Spousal Aggression

A complaint from Kenyatta: "There are soldiers everywhere! In the bathroom! On the kitchen table! On the couch! What is going on!"

To clarify, I have a copy of North And South magazine in the bathroom, A Grand Army Of Black Men is on the kitchen table, and a Cannons: An Introduction To Civil War Artillery is on the couch.

It's funny. I'm still the kid, I was in school. I was a terrible student, and yet I had a curiosity that would border on obsession. I failed eleventh grade English, because my teacher would give me a zero every time I forgot to bring my copy of the Odyssey to class. What did I need with that book? I had read the whole thing the first week of school, as soon as I saw it on the syllabus.

We don't change, do we?

On another note, a colleague has informed me that he has a second home near Sharpsburg. I have already told him, that he should have kept that to himself. I'm going to camp out on his porch. Kenyatta insists that she isn't coming with me. She'll learn...

In Defense Of Tony Romo

People need to lay off the kid. He's a very good quarterback:

...since 2006, only 6 quarterbacks AVERAGE a +10 TD/INT in each of the years. Exactly 3 QB's in the entire NFL have thrown 80 touchdowns during that span. And only 1 was doing it in his first 3 years as a starting Quarterback in the National Football League - Tony Romo.

Read the rest. He fumbles too much, but I wouldn't trade him for anything. I think he has an owner who's too in love with media. I think he has a coach who should be coordinating. I think the Cowboys have problems. I don't think quarterback is one of them.

MSNBC's Resident Racist

It's incredible. I keep telling myself to not be shocked. Pat Buchanan wants access to Sonia Sotomayor's LSAT scores. It's absolutely amazing that this dude has a job on a job, and ultimately, it says a lot about his employers and the people who enjoy his company. After watching the video, it's worth looking into some of Pat's other views. Among them these choice words for black folks:

...no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

There's more if you want to dig. It's amazing to me that people actually sit next to this cat, and have the balls to let the word "postracial" pass across their lips.

Props to Gene Robinson for fighting the fight. I guess I feel like words have their limits. Watch at the end where he just totally breaks down and claims "Everyone graduates summa cum laude from Harvard, now."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Myth Of Black Confederate Soldiers

Whenever someone finds out I'm reading about the Civil War (off blog, I mean) they feel obliged to inform me that black people fought for the Confederacy. From what I can tell, this is basically false. It's true, in the early stages of the War, some regiments made up of free blacks tried to form, but they were promptly refused.

The Native Guard in Louisiana mustered, but basically ended up serving on the side of the Union. And then at the very end of the War, Lee, in desperate straits, consented to raising a black regiment. But they never fought either. Moreover, there are scattered reports of black slaves doing things like fighting in defense of their master, but certainly nothing approaching the USCT.

If I have this wrong, please correct me.

More interesting to me is why the myth holds so much sway. I think it's an extension of the Lost Cause theology--if there were black regiments fighting for the Confederacy, the War couldn't have been about slavery.

Meanwhile, in the open thread, Brucds links the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, which begins as follow:

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.

These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.

That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Bruno And Babs

I think, I'm one of the few people, in my demographic cohort, who doesn't get Sacha Baron Cohen. I get why he's funny. Indeed, I think he's hilarious. I just don't think there's anything particularly deep going on. I know there's a whole contingent of lefties who enjoy seeing bigots embarrassed and mocked. I'm not really one of them.

I think there's something bullying in Cohen's whole shtick--the way he gleefully embarrasses Red Staters but then let's Pam Anderson in on the joke. I don't know. It is funny. But I thought Jackass The Movie was funny. (I'm Roflerz for "Rocket Skates," "Ass Kicked By a Girl" and the one where they do a roller derby in a moving truck. Laughing just thinking about it.) So I don't know what that means.

That said, Young Chris, subbing for Sully, points us to Barbara Walters predictably over the top condemnation of "Bruno." Walters claims that if you aren't homophobic, this movie will make you. Right. This is akin to saying if you're not a racist, Al Sharpton will make you one. I think the greater likelihood is that, if you are homophobic, Bruno will give you ammo. The kind of ammo you were looking for anyway.

Open Thread At Noon

Go for it. Me? I'm going for another shot of Nyquil. It's good that I can work form home. This whole joint is a fucking biohazard right about now.

The Efficacy Of Race-Baiting

Matt notes the logic behind Pat Buchanan's calls for GOP senators to more explicitly use race against Sotomayor:

At any rate, while Buchanan is being repugnant, I do think this is something conservatives are going to want to think about. Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We're talking about a guy who's too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it's not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.
Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it's not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority. An analogy might be to religion. When the country was overwhelmingly Christian, Christianity didn't play much of a role in our politics. But as the Christian majority shrank it became more and more viable to explicitly mobilize Christian identity for political purposes.

There are a couple problems here, I'd submit. One is that Sotomayor isn't black (except in Baltimore.) She's a Latina. Amping up the race-baiting isn't just going to turn off black people (most of whom are already turned-off) it turns off Latinos also.

The second problem is that it likely turns a significant portion of white people also. The GOP's problem isn't that it needs to shore up Alabama--at least not yet. It's problem is, well, basically everywhere else that isn't Alabama. I don't know how bashing Sotomayor makes you more competitive in, say, Colorado or Oregon. I'd assume the opposite.

Altogether, I think this is awful political advice. But it's about what you'd expect from the guy who, as one of Matt's commenters note, told us that Sarah Palin would steal women from Obama. You don't have to be right to do Buchanan's job. Or even sincere. You just have to be very loud.

The Year Of Lincoln

Over at Kiko's House, there's a whole index of posts on Lincoln. Pretty awesome. I'm slowly coming to the realization that I'm going to have to actually read a Lincoln biography. Damn. I was so looking forward to holding on to my simplified view of him as a racist, political opportunist. Damn my open mind!

All jokes aside, I am now taking recommendations on a solid one-volume treatment of Lincoln. I'm not interested in books that only look at him from a particular perspective, or in a particular period. (Lincoln And His Generals, Team Of Rivals etc.) No disrespect to any of those, which I'm sure are great, but I'm looking for a more complete biography. At the moment it looks like a toss-up between Lincoln and With Malice Toward None.

I doubt I'll get to it within the next six months. The reading is piling up. Also, I expect to move toward more primary sources by September.

The Thing About Michael Steele...

...is that he has no sense of context and timing. By now you guys have heard about Steele's crack about "fried chicken and potato salad" as a means of diversifying the GOP. Now, I'm a fan of fried chicken and potato salad. The two go together like burgers and buns. I'm also a fan of off-color jokes--this is precisely the sort of quip I would make to my very integrated readership here.

But I wouldn't make that joke while speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I wouldn't make that joke in a meeting with my editors, all of whom are white. And I certainly wouldn't make that joke were a member of a party where prominent members think "Barack the Magic Negro" is funny. Or in a party where prominent members belong to country clubs that exclude blacks. Or in a party where Jeff Sessions is charged with protecting white men against the scourge Puerto-Rican domination. Context, Brother Mike. Context.

And now for more fried chicken jokes...

Civil War\Slavery Readings

For those keeping track, the next book is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I read it as a kid and in college, but I feel the need to go back. One disappointment is that, as much as I can tell, there isn't a really solid recent biography on Douglass. Do I have that wrong? Anyone read a good one?

The War Inside The Civil War

I just finished Noah Andre Trudeau's Like Men Of War, which is a history of black soldiers in the Civil War. It obviously pays considerable attention to Nathan Bedford Forrest's massacre of black troops at Fort Pillow. But, because Trudeau's book is so sweeping, it actually (almost unwittingly) provides context to Forrest's war crimes. Let's consider this letter from a white Lieutenant of colored troops commenting after the fight at Fort Blakey in Alabama:

The rebel line of skirmishers seeing us comung up fell back int their works. As soon as our niggers caught sight of the retreating figures of the rebs, the very devil could not hold them. Their eyes glittered like serpents and with yells & howls like hungry wolves, they rushed to the rebel work...The rebs were panic-struck, numbers of them jumping into the river and were drowned in attempting to cross, or were shot while swimming. Still others threw down their arms and ran for their lives over to the white troops on our left to give themsleves up to save being butchered by our niggers. The niggers did not take a prisoner. They killed all they took to a man.

To my mind, there was the regular Civil War, between North and South. And then there was this second Civil War between slave and master, or freedman and slave-master. The Civil War, which we think about, was brother against brother--sometimes literally. It's McClellan wanting to prosecute a "gentle" war. It's prisoner exchanges, and parole. Then there is the second Civil War, in which you have two people who, in the old phrasing, "just don't like each other very much."

Many black soldiers were essentially impressed into the Army. Others went to strike a blow for freedom. And still others went to preserve the Union. And then there was that final group--those looking to settle old scores. In truth, none of these groups were mutually exclusive from the other. But I think, when we talk about black soldiers in the Civil War, the noble chivalrous sheen (think Glory) doesn't account for that oldest of human emotions--vengeance.

When black soldiers went into combat, I think large numbers of them were thinking about the big payback. On the other hand, when white Confederate soldiers went to war against black regiments they had two responses. 1.) A maniacal hatred for them, a blood-frenzy stoked by the notion of slaves taking up arms. 2.) A deep-seated fear at exactly what these black soldiers might do. I suspect, that often, both of these emotions were bound up together.

The result was that, as we've talked about, you'd have a shockingly low number of black soldiers taken prisoner--evidence of massacre. But you'd also get these scattered reports of black soldiers nkilling men who were trying to surrender.

Part of this is the "Remember Fort Pillow" ethos. But I suspect another part of it is just a sheer desire for vengeance. A lot of these guys had been slaves in the Deep South. The prospect of the "get-back" must have been intoxicating. The point isn't to let Forrest off the hook--there is no black equivalent to Fort Pillow. But it's to see his actions in the context of this internal war, within the war. I hate thinking about black folks as blameless.

Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

I feel like I'm seeing a bunch of glancing blows, nothing landing with any force. I'm very interested in Sotomayor's style of speech--she has painfully perfect enunciation. She reminds me of one of those teachers in middle school who worked hard to scrub away the hood accent. That's not a dis--I think that sort of scrubbing comes from the knowledge that people will discriminate against you based on how you talk. Kenyatta was saying earlier that Sotomayor's speech reminded her of the women she went to church with as a child.

Now, Sotomayor is Puerto-Rican. So I suspect that her diction comes from a similar and yet different space. I suspect that being Latino puts a lot pressure on you to make your English perfect. And yet in her perfection, she actually sounds hood to me. How ironic.

Open Thread At Noon

It's yours...

Time For Some Smoke, Rich

I think writers should watch more Richard Pryor. I watched part of Live On The Sunset Strip back in college--or rather part of it. I actually didn't think it was that funny. Looking back on it now, a large part of the problem was that I came up on Eddie Murphy Raw and Def Comedy Jam. In other words, I watched it wanting to laugh from beginning to end.

Yesterday, I rewatched Sunset Strip on a lark, and thought on it, and realized that one-way of watching the film is not to think of Pryor as a stand-up comic, but as a theater dude doing a comedic one man show. Sunset Strip is really funny, don't get me wrong. But there are moments of great seriousness. It felt like memoir.

The chief tool is Pryor's vulnerability, and a Niebuhrian humility. (Can you tell I read the Irony Of History in the last year? Can you tell I really like that word?) Pryor is not so much commenting on the world, as he's commenting on how the world (God?) keeps inverting his own assumptions. He goes to prison talking black pride, but comes out thinking "Thank God, we got prisons." He picks up a hitch-hiker in Africa and is offended by his odor, but then finds that the African is so offended by Pryor's odor that he asks to be let out the car. He talks about trying to do how his "scary black guy" doesn't actually work on all white people.

All of this is really, really late. People smarter than me, older than me, and wiser than me have likely already said as much. I actually remember them saying it, but I was to young and dumb to get it. But I understand, now. I understand why Cosby, and others, were so incensed by Def Comedy Jam. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of those guys--Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Cedric etc. But I'm put in the mind of my reflections on the great Biggie Smalls. I loved Biggie for his technique, not for the stuff about cars, drugs, girls etc. He was just a nasty technician, subject matter be damned:

Recently niggers frontin, ain't saying nothing
So I just speak my piece, keep my piece
Cubans with the Jesus piece with my peeps
Packin, asking who want it, You got it nigga flaunt it
That Brooklyn bullshit we on it.

But the MCs who came up after big didn't see the rhyme-scheme or how he played with the rythym. They saw "Cubans" "Jesus piece" and "Brooklyn." And so what we got was a grip of rappers claiming Biggie, but not really aspiring to what made Biggie great.

I think for old-heads, who came up on Richard Pryor, watching Def Comedy Jam must have been what it was like for me to hear a Fabolous album. It's a facile imitation. Almost every comic today can curse like Richard Pryor. But I don't know a single one who exhibits the artistic courage you see in this clip, where Pryor tells millions of people, precisely, how he set himself on fire.

It makes you vunerable to discuss precisely how and where you were wrong. This isn't just about art. Our media is filled with people brandishing one essential message, "I'm right and here's why." Some of them undoutbly are. Most of them are not. I think young writers can find a lot of gold in examining their past convictions, and their fragility when pitted against experience and history.

Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip Clip

Obama And The Narrative Of "Hard Truths"

I keep noticing that whenever Obama delivers these "tough talks" or messages of "tough love" the recipients, most of them to people of color, are generally cheering. I watched Obama's Ghana speech, and by the lights of my limited knowledge of African affairs, it seemed pretty basic, and I suspect a large number of Africans agreed with him. I'd also suspect that a large number didn't. My point isn't that Obama "represents" opinion in Africa, as much as it's that he represents one side of it. To go to Ghana and demand working, credible democracies just doesn't strike me as much of a stretch. But from the headlines, you'd think Obama had given his speech in Zimbabwe.

I don't think this is about race, per se, as much as it's about how we in the press see conflict--it's generally easier to report out a two-sided conflict than a multi-facted one. It's also about a kind of journalistic laziness that sees the world like this: Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are black leaders. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson believe that racism is responsible for everything wrong with black America. If Obama says, "Be a father to your child," he's challenging black people. Likewise for Africa the calculus is something like: Africans think all their problems were caused by colonialism. If Obama says it's corruption, then he must be challenging Africans.

It's an algebra that relies on figureheads and "spokespeople" to articulate the thoughts and feelings of millions. As long as I can remember this talk about a "crisis of fatherhood," I can remember their being an intrinsic, native "black fatherhood" movement. And this was in Baltimore in the 80s--ground zero. When Obama was in college, it was rappers who were telling brothers "be a father to your child." (along with a lot of other things.) I suspect that it's the same in Africa, that Obama is representing a side of the debate--a native side--which, while understanding the evils of colonialism, also understands that corruption and big man-ism are enemies of progress. I saw a lot of stories on Nigerians being pissed off that Obama wasn't coming to their country. Of course Wole Soyinka has, in strenuous tones, asserted that Obama must not come to Nigeria.

There are two problems here: One, I think the tone of the stories reflect a desire for white people to be off the hook. I don't know that for fact, but I believe it. Two, I think the tone of these stories carry a strong notion of Obama civilizing, or righting, his dark kin. I think this dynamic is backwards. It's the very presence of the native fatherhood movement that enables Obama to say "be a father." It's the fact that Africans, themselves, have been fighting corruption that allows Obama to make that speech. As in so many things, Obama isn't the wave, he's the dude surfing on top.

The Boredom Of The Sotomayor Hearings

My old friend (and fellow WashCP alum) Mike Schaffer isn't expecting fireworks:

In explaining why confirmation battles have lost their drama, more significant than this self-policing is the fact that this sort of inside-baseball analysis is now commonplace in everyday life, in and out of politics: We watch Hardball not for the substance of people's arguments, but for how they're posturing around the day's issues; we game out American Idol more or less the same way. There's no shortage of opportunity to watch groups of variously informed experts sit in judgment of ambitious nobodies grasping for their dreams. And as TV gives way to other media, those variously informed experts include ourselves: In the heyday of the television era, ordinary citizens had to rely on others--say, hearing-room antagonists like Thomas and Hill--to act out a divided society's symbolically charged confrontations. In the vast interactive universe of the internet, we do it ourselves, all day long. American discourse, in the end, has become one big, permanent, unruly confirmation hearing.

So even with an unexpected culture-war flare-up, don't expect much excitement about the hearings that started this week. If Ricci and his supporters want to transfix a new generation of hearing obsessives, they will have to not simply outshout Sotomayor's squad, but make themselves heard above the din of our Confirmation Nation. Maybe he can sing like Susan Boyle.

I actually don't expect much from Ricci. I just don't think there's much of an argument to stick on Sotomayor. She really is the perfect Obama pick--the sort of justice that forces rabid right-wingers into overplaying their hand.

Back To Life

Thanks for all the get well notes guys. Still in a haze, but I'm going to give it a go. Yesterday my throat was killing me and I couldn't think straight. We got a lot up for today--Sotomayor, Richard Pryor, and an apologia for those who love Nathan Forrest.

Anyway, man I remember rocking this joint the summer of 89. Frank Ski used to play the acapella on V103, and then bring in the drums. Man, bring back real DJs. One thing though--I don't remember the fashion being so bad. I guess that's how it is, though. We are the 70s now. Maybe they catch a break for being British.

Soul II Soul - Back To Life
by papafonk

Down And Out On Lenox Ave

Folks I'm sick and in the midst of a Theraflu-induced haze. Forgive my shortage of posts. I can barely think straight. Talk among yourselves, and keep it clean.

Mayo v. Miracle Whip

Commenter Brucds is pissed that I blamed mayo on his people:

And exactly how did moms make the potato salad in your house ? You can blame us for a lot of shit, but the enthusiasm for too much mayonnaise has long been officially "black."

This is, of course, false as commenter Ulysses notes:

...in our community, the condiment ingredient of potato salad is actually Miracle Whip instead of Mayo. This is nearly universal to the degree that there are entire generations who are unaware that "mayonnaise" and Miracle Whip are in fact different. Many of us, never having tasted actual mayonnaise until adulthood, find its taste off-putting but still use the terms interchangeably.

Now, a quick aside. I'm always wary of essentialism, and in fact, a large point of this blog is to make fun of the whole concept of what's black and what's white. The idea of "white music" is laughable, just as "only white people eat mayo" is laughable, just as white people fucked up the world for everyone else" is...oh, wait...

Seriously though, the whole conceit is hyperbole, and to show you how much, I have something to admit: It's true I was raised on hot sauce, but I was also raised on Hellman's--to the point that I actually hate Miracle Whip. That twang at the end is just disgusting. Indeed, on the list of things I'd change about black people, "usage of Miracle Whip" comes right after "addiction to Kool-Aid."

That's the whole point of the "white music" thing. For all my breaking on white people, I can't dance a lick or play a whit of ball. And I have a lot of company in that among my people. Well not a lot.... Certainly not as much as I would like...OK, so I'm the only brother at the party that can't do the Whop. You got me. Happy now?

A More Open Music Thread

After my post on Mos Def, my book editor, the brilliant Chris Jackson, sends along the following note. He loves the new Mos, and urged me to pick it up:

...you're still wrong (and also comping apples to oranges) - trust me: I was studying up on white folks music while you were still swearing to Van Sertima and trust me, YYY's, meh, Mos Def, awesome. "Priority" kills anything on that YYY album, Casa Bey and Quiet Dog have more compressed energy and intelligence and musical risk-taking than any of the YYY's white-girl lullabyes. And the lyrics are really not even worth getting into a comparison because it would be so crazily unfair. YYY's = snooze. I rock Jasper to sleep w/it! Seriously. If you want white-girl lullabye music, try Cat Power, at least she's weird and occasionally complex and unpredictable. If you want Brooklyn-style rough-edged post-everything dance-yr-ass-off music, check for Santogold. And Mos kills 'em all --That is All.

Hah!

All jokes aside, this is good time to hear what everyone's listening to. That Passion Pit album had some bangers, but it was all highs. I would have liked some variety. Also, we were talking about Sam Cooke's Live At The Harlem Square Club album a few posts down. Here's a sample. Everyone should own it. I love the live versions of the old soul joints. This and Wilson Pickett's "Live And Burnin" version of Midnight Hour are great.

The part at the end where Sam's talking about how he has to go, is really stirring, giving how young he died. I hope Ben Bradlee is listening...

Having A Party - Sam Cooke

Why Palin Won't Make It Out Of A GOP Primary

Because her spokesperson is trading shots with a 19-year old kid. It makes liberals, like me, feel good that the GOP is a wreck, and the notion of Sarah Palin as the standard-bearer only increases the scale of that wreckage. It also validates a certain idea about certain voters, and their relative intelligence. I would just argue that we should not confuse a poll with the rigors of an actual election. A lot of you think I'm underestimating Palin. But I think people are underestimating the GOP. The desire to win has a way of taming folks.

This Is How We Lost To The White Man

Copped the Mos Def album, and I'm ashamed to report that it hasn't grabbed me. Love his MCing, as always. The beats not too much.

I can't help but think that the YYYs have something to do with this. Damn these white people and their damned white music. Damn them all. They'll make mayo-eaters out of everyone of us, yet. Or maybe just me...

Soft Shock - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Open Thread At Noon

Go for it...

Pay To Play

The New York Times is considering charging its readers five bucks a month to read online. I would pay. But I guess I'm biased...

Civil War Booklist

Several of you have asked for this. We're actually working on a sidebox that would have the books and the relevant posts, as they come. For now, here's what I have.

1.) Ida: A Sword Among Lions--Paula Giddings
2.) Up From History--Robert J. Norrell
3.) Capitol Men--Phillip Dray
4.) A Nation Under Our Feet--Steven Hahn
5.) Battle Cry Of Freedom--James McPherson
6.) This Republic Of Suffering--Drew Gilpin Faust
7.) Like Men Of War: Black Troops In The Civil War 1862-1865--Noah Andre Trudeau

As you can see, the list actually doesn't start out with the War. I thought it was important to show how I got interested in the first place, and how my thinking evolved. Much of it was actually led by my commenters. A few other things--rewatching Glory contribuited quite a bit. And these lectures by Yale historian David Blight are essential. You have to listen to them.

I'm about 100 pages away from finishing Like Men Of War. There's a strong possibility that I'll go with A People's History Of The Civil War next. Either that or this book American Slavery, American Freedom, which is a history of slavery in Virginia.

While I'm at it, another question: Can you guys recommend a good book on the South after the war? Not so much on Reconstruction, but on the condition of the Southern States, in terms of infrastructure, the psychology of the people etc. in the first couple years after the War. I've picked up pieces and bits of this from the books I've read, but I haven't found a volume that's focused on it.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I've seen many, many, many recommendations on Reconstruction and/or race. Foner has come up repeatedly. As has Tony Horwitz. I mean no disrespect to them, or to any of their books, which I have no doubt are stellar. I also mean no disrespect to anyone recommending them. I just want people to be clear about the question I'm asking.

I'm asking about the condition of the railroads, postwar, the condition of people's farms, how white farmers handled the financial implications of the war. Where did all these white slaveholders who fled Sherman go? What did they see when they came back? How did they rebuild? Obviously race is part of that, as is Reconstruction. I'm looking to move the lens a bit, if possible.

Also, no fiction. Again, I mean no disrespect at all. I'm just asking a different question.

New Haven Extended

GOP Senators plan to call on Ricci and friends for the Sotomayor hearings:

The two parties offered glimpses Thursday of their strategy going into the weeklong Judiciary Committee hearings that open Monday, announcing outside witnesses who will testify about Sotomayor. Republicans' list of 14 includes New Haven, Conn., firefighter Frank Ricci, a white employee whose reverse discrimination claim was rejected by Sotomayor in an appeals court decision.
Ricci challenged the city's decision to scrap the results of a promotion test because too few minorities scored high enough to qualify. Sotomayor was part of a panel that rejected Ricci's challenge. The Supreme Court reversed that ruling last week.

The cynicism is predictable. But they could be overplaying their hand. Or not. I'm just not sure how much people care, given that the case is decided. And given that Sotomayor will be replacing Souter.

Also, let's not re-debate the actual case. We spent many weeks on it. If you must, save it for the open thread at noon.

UPDATE: Closing comments. This thread is getting dominated by three or four people. You guys should take it to e-mail.

Steve McNair And Postracialism

I think my use of the term "brothers" yesterday confused some folks. I meant it in the broadest possible way--as a sub for "men." All men. It wasn't meant to call out black men. Apologies for the confusion.

A Note Of Thanks

Props to everyone on that military tactics post below. I'm going to have many, many more questions just like that one. You guys are great. It's a reciprocal process here.

Dumb Question Time

One of the cool things about having really smart commenters is that you can lean on them when you're stumped.

So as everyone knows, I've been doing a ton of reading about the Civil War. Marching, obviously, keeps coming up. There's a lot about the concept of marching, forming the line and forming ranks that is simply flying over my head, as I've never read much about war, or served in the military. Can I ask a few of you to talk some about the importance of forming a line in the Civil War? Also, can someone talk about the importance of staying in ranks, and why marching together is so important?

There are some obvious answers that come to mind, but I sense that I may be missing some more important reasons.

Blaming The Writers

The dudes who penned the Transformers script are backing away from the minstrelbots:

Cole: I heard that the gold tooth was Michael Bay's idea, but do you have any response to those who found The Twins offensive?

Orci: Number one, we sympathize. Yes, the gold tooth was not in the script, that's true.

Kurtzman: It's really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it.I think that would be very foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it's their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it's a choice that was made. If anything, it just shows you that we don't control every aspect of the movie.

Cole: Were you offended by them?

Kurtzman: I wasn't thrilled. I certainly wasn't thrilled.

Orci: Yeah, same reaction. I'm not easily offended, but when I saw it, I thought, 'Someone's gonna write about that.'"

Open Thread At Noon

It's all you...

The Girls Step Up To This

I've been thinking a lot about Steve McNair, and how men process intimacy, marriage and sex. But first I need to say that this is an awkward post. I think after reading this, none of my boys will have a beer with me for at least a year. But since I'm mostly a homebody these days, anyway, I figure I don't have much to lose.

I'm pretty libertarian about these matters. I really have no idea what arrangement Steve McNair had with his wife. I also think the people in a relationship ultimately are the ones who should outline it's boundaries. I believe that monogamy isn't for everyone, and that those who choose to live in other ways don't deserve to be shamed. I think men, in particular, struggle with exclusivity. This is my belief--but I've been challenged on it, repeatedly, by women. So I don't take it as fact--it's just how I feel. And it may well be wrong.

But all of that aside, I think it's about time for men to take more responsibility for their bodies and sex lives. Women, I am told, have to constantly think about protecting themselves. They have to give more thought to what situations they end up in. Who they're sleeping with, and who they're entering into a relationship. Rape and physical abuse always hangs in the air. Men, I think because of sheer physical strength, believe that we don't have to think this way. We think we can take few shots at the bar, screw whoever, wake up at nine, hit the waffle house, and then drive home with a great story to tell.

People should read up on Sam Cooke--greatest soul-singer ever, dead in a cheap motel, with no pants, after a prostitute took his clothes. We should think hard on Steve McNair, shot in his sleep; he fell out on the couch and never woke up. He had no idea what happened. I don't know if that fits the exact definition of domestic violence, but it's damn close. I keep wondering what he was doing with a 20 year-old girl who worked at Dave and Buster's. I understand the regular temptations, but the recklessness of it all is amazing.

I don't want to blame McNair for his own death, but the fact is that men who are reckless, often leave behind families to pick up the pieces. I can't imagine the personal work his wife will have to do reconcile all of this, and then explain it to their four sons.

This isn't one of those "men's rights" riffs, and it's clear that men will never face the same sort of physical dangers that women face. But I think brothers could give a little more thought to who they take their clothes off in front of, or at least who they go paragliding with. I've seen things go wrong for men in so many other ways. Brothers forbidden from seeing kids. Brothers paying insane alimony. Brothers coming outside and finding their car missing. Brothers wondering if a kid is actually theirs. The temptation is to rail against women. A more introspective approach would begin with, "What the fuck was I thinking?"

I think brothers need to bury the mythology of the "Crazy Chick" once and for all. Maybe if I was Denzel, I wouldn't be calling for that. Maybe I'd be calling for more crazy chicks. Moreover, having already survived my wilder, younger years, this may be hypocritical. I don't know. But we need to think harder about what we do our bodies. It ain't like the old days. The girls are packing heat.

Before I Let Go

Andrew explains why he can't quit Sarah:

It's because of John McCain, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. What happened last fall was a warning sign to all of us about how corrupt and cynical the GOP, McCain and the MSM are. They colluded in such a way that this unstable, erratic, know-nothing beauty queen could actually have been president of the United States. What matters is that all those in on this scam be exposed and their way of conducting themselves be reformed until they stop risking the fate of the country and the world on their own vanities and cowardice.

McCain knew full well that Palin was unqualified to be commander-in-chief at this period of time; and he knew there was no way she could ever learn enough to do the job. So his decision to pick her was pure cynicism and irresponsibility. The MSM knew full well that there were very serious questions about this unknown person's background, lies, mental stability, and secrecy - but they were so terrified of being called biased they refused to do the proper vetting.

I think the McCain part is what sticks for me. I don't condemn him as hard as others, because I never really bought the myth. I think men often do great things. I think they often do petty things, too. Sometimes, the same man, does both.

Echoes Of The Crack Age

The underground is down for peace among brothers...

I remember when they did this on Arsenio. Cats came to school the next day, talking about how Shock G ripped it. Man, almost 20 years ago.

Half these cats I don't even remember. But I was in love with Terrible T from .357. Damn, she was phat to death. Man, to be young again.

Advancing In A Different Direction

Steve Benen notes that Sarah Palin's seemingly disastrous withdrawal, isn't really seen that way among the rank and file:

Among Republican voters, even now, 71% would be likely to vote for her for President of the United States.
Inexplicably quitting, for less-than-clear reasons, has managed to endear Palin to her party more.
Somewhere, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are probably smacking their foreheads, saying, "You've got to be kidding me."

I don't know. I think this is akin to picking Super Bowl favorites in before the season. What's that great Tyson quote? Everybody's got a plan until they get hit. I would be shocked if Sarah Palin wins the Republican primary. The rigors of the campaign tend to expose amateurs.

Open Thread At Noon

Sorry for the paucity of content guys. I spent all morning working on that Ivy League post. And I've spent most of the week turning it over in my head. This is how the sausage gets made.

This thread is yours.

Oh one more thing. I'm so proud that my baby got in Columbia. She is tired of me saying this. I will not stop. She can not make me stop. I will never stop.

The Importance Of Being Ivy League

I was thinking about this "meritocratic vs. democratic" notion this morning, and I think I hit upon a significant divide in how I'm processing things, and how many of my readers are processing things. The fact of the matter is simple---I am black. Most of the people who read this blog, in all likelihood, are white. Our history differs, and most importantly in this case, the make-up of our communities differ.

A guy wrote me yesterday arguing, as a lot of you have argued, that what Ross is really invoking is a "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" ideal. I wrote back asking why Barack Obama could not be a "Mr. Smith." He wrote back the following:

Because his talents are uncommon.

To put my point another way, if I said, "The average American voter simply can't understand complicated national issues." Your response would not be "You're wrong; Barack Obama understands complicated national issues." A response like that would make no sense--Obama is is a singularly talented individual; he's not just a representative American voter. In order to have faith in democracy, we have to believe that a majority of us, not simply the best of us, are capable of making the right call.

Obama doesn't work as Mr. Smith because Obama is not just your local boy scouts leader from next door. Obama is a brilliant man. His talent can't give me faith that my neighbor is making good decisions in the voting booth because Obama is much smarter than my neighbor.

That's why Obama's triumph isn't a victory for the "democratic ideal".

I think this is a pretty solid argument. But it makes assumptions about the American experience that some of us simply don't share. More to the point this "democratic ideal" is really a euphemism for white populism, and from a black perspective, even white tyranny.

The history is helpful, here. For most of this country's history, being black and brilliant was not something that set you a part from other black people--it was something that could get you killed by white people. A study of this country's history reveals to not be hyperbole. This notion that white people of medium talents could rise to rule the world was not simply "the democratic ideal," it was the tyranny of our lives--with depressing, disastrous effects. The idea that mediocre white people could rise to incredible levels of power was not so much an ideal for us--it was the whole point of white supremacy.

We obviously live in a different era. But still, one of the most depressing things about being black and "making it" is the incredible randomness of it all. I have said this many times--I was a terrible student. To the extent that intelligence is measurable, I sat in classrooms with people who were smarter than me, worked harder than me, and studied longer than me. I was not without my own gifts--I possessed an obsessive and singular curiosity. I had a vivid imagination. I was creative. But I was also immature and lazy, and if not for the steady prodding/pushing/spanking/cajoling of my parents, I don't think you'd be reading this blog.

When you're black, and likely when you're Latino, and likely when you're a kind of white, you see brilliant people all the time--and they get taken out in the most horrific ways. They have kids too soon. They get shot on the way home from school. They get hooked on crack. They go to jail. And then there is that one kid who makes it, who despite the wages of race in this country, goes on and does something big. To many black people, that person is Barack Obama.

Continue reading "The Importance Of Being Ivy League" »

McNamara

I meant to say how much I loved The Fog of War, the other day. Great flick. Also, people should check out this Fresh Air interview with McNamara and Errol Morris, who did Fog Of War.

Wait, I Still Function!

Yeah, that's the stuff...

UPDATE: Forgot this part. Kup and Hot Rod were awesome. Good times...

I'm Not Going To Get Offended Because A Transformer Can't Read

Larry Wilmore said that last week out in Aspen. He was responding to a question from the floor. He makes a good point. Moreover, I think stereotypes are generally the result of lazy writing. To the extent that Michael Bay is doing Transformers, I generally expect any black people in camera-range to come off pretty poorly. That said, Alyssa's take is worth reading.

Ethnic humor is, I think, generally effective under a couple of fixed circumstances: a) when it comes from within the minority group being parodied, as with the best of Woody Allen and the Jews, b) it expresses something true that is difficult to say under polite or serious circumstances by carrying something far beyond its logical conclusion or realistic bounds, c) it subverts our expectations or understanding of the group in question, or of the teller. I think 30 Rock in particular has done a terrific job with ethnic humor, whether it's Irish (Season 1, Episode 17, when Alec Baldwin, his father, and his brother, played by Nathan Lane, announce the names of their fists, which are, respectively, St. Patrick and St. Michael, Tip O'Neill and Bobby Sands, and Bono and Sandra Day O'Connor, falling under categories a and b) or African-American (the running feud between Tracy and Twofer fulfills all three categories at once), especially in Tracy's plans for a Thomas Jefferson movie, which refer to the former president as a "jungle-fever haver," while also mocking African-American actors like Eddie Murphy...

The African-American coded robots in Transformers do none of those things. There's nothing clever about suggesting that black people can't read (unlike the 30 Rock episode where Tracy, who writes a column and complains about George Will, pretends he can't read to expose Liz's racism and to get out of work) or to have stereotypically ghetto characters threaten "to pop a cap" in someone or call someone a "pussy." All that coding is racist, sure, but as a cinematic choice, it's worse: it's boring.

What's most amazing to me is that there were actual "black" Transformers in the old cartoon, back in the 80s, who weren't really offensive. And yet as the clock's moved forward, Bay is actually, creatively, gone backward. Oh well. I think I should probably care more that this guy is eviscirating my childhood. I just don't. Maybe it wasn't all of that to begin with.

Open Thread At Noon

Did you miss these?

The Democratic Vs. The Meritocratic

Courtesy of comments, Democracy In America gets at something I missed in Ross's column. Here's Ross:

Palin's popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Here's DIA:

The problem with Mr Douthat's argument is that the democratic ideal, as much as there is one, is the meritocratic ideal. Americans don't simply believe that anyone can grow up to be a success. They believe that with hard work anyone can grow up to be a success. And for many (like Mr Obama) an Ivy-League education is indicative of that hard work. It would be quite a stretch to paint someone like Mr Obama with the same brush as, say, George Bush, who was gifted his stays at Harvard and Yale. Mr Obama's success story, Ivy-League education and all, is as much a story of the "everyman" as Mrs Palin's.

The problem is this notion that by merely not attending an Ivy, you somehow automatically fulfill the "democratic ideal." It's true Americans respect people who make it in the world without coming from an elite background. But the idea that the only real marker of that background is a college acceptance letter is reductive.

Palin is not so much an example of the democratic ideal as she is an example of the American Idol reject ideal. Most Americans believe everyone, no matter their background, has the right to compete. Very few believe everyone, no matter their suckage, has the right to win.

Again, I think race is key. From Conor Friedersdorf:

Given the history of race in America, the election of a mixed race black man to the presidency -- Columbia and Harvard or not -- ought to have as much a claim to fulfilling the democratic ideal as the nomination of a woman who didn't attend an Ivy League college. We've had our Andrew Jacksons and our Jimmy Carters. Despite the frequency of Ivy League presidents, no one doubts that a candidate from a less elite educational pedigree can be elected. Which candidate caused more Americans to reconsider the kind of person who might be elected to the presidency, Barack Obama or Sarah Palin?

It just strikes me as blind to argue that in the year that America elected it's first black president, that the democratic ideal has failed. Seriously, if the only qualifier is that you don't attend an Ivy, why wasn't Jesse Jackson's loss in 88 evidence of the failure of the democratic ideal?

Sarah Palin Represents Real America

I know this because Mika Brezinski told me. I don't think there's anything serious to address in her point. There are a lot of hours to fill. Gotta say something. One interesting notion is that we're seeing a kind of mirror-image of the Left in the 60s and 70s. Or maybe not, I wasn't around then and my reading on the era isn't as thorough as it should be. But my understanding is that a large part of our problem--or the New Left's problem--was that we got weighted down in theory, and lost touch with actual people.

I get the same impression whenever I hear people pull out this hamfisted notion of Real America. It's like there are no people in "Real America"--just cartoon cut-outs yelling "Don't take our guns." It is, as I said yesterday, the Al Sharpton analysis--distilling millions of complicated people through the lens of one person who happens to attract a lot of ink.

The worst part of the "Real America" analysis is that while it means to slap down "media elite"--much as the old radicals were aiming for the corporate elite--it's offers nothing but elbows for the Everymen it claims to uplift. It turns him into a cartoon and fetishizes him. He is not a person. He is the beer track.

I don't want to say much more. I fear that I may become what I inveigh against.

Obsessed With The Accidental War For The Freedom Of Black People

This blog will be focusing a good deal of attention on the Civil War for a while. As you can see below, we'll still have plenty to say about Sarah Palin, the NFL, Warcraft and black folks in general. But the Civil War is now an official obsession of mine.

To wit, I have several mini-thoughts I'd offer up from some of my latest readings. Some of these are questions, and some of them are observations. Civil War buffs, and non-Civil War buffs, are welcome to chime in.

--Was the Union really as poorly led as it seems? I've been doing a lot of reading about The Siege of Petersburg, and The Crater, in particular. Apparently, two of the generals in the fight, stayed behind the lines, drinking themselves silly, while Union soldiers were slaughtered.

--It's fascinating to think about my own expectations for black soldiers in the War. There's a temptation to search for a kind of blaxploitation figure who grabs a Gatling Gun and starts mowing down the Secesh. There are heroes everywhere. But there is also so much tragedy. It's really hard to read about Forrest. But you have to acknowledge that he was Scourge to black soldiers in Tennessee. And he got away with it. It's just true. I've been thinking about the Ving Rhames character in Rosewood. Black history as suffering is wrong. But so is black history as a revenge flick.

--One of my favorite quotes comes from Andre Cailloux, a hero of the Native Guard, one of the first black regiments put in the field. He dies heroically at Port Hudson. His soldiers, grieving over his death, hold a seance and summon his spirit. Calloux reaches back from the grave and tells his troops, "They thought they had killed me, but they made me live." They made me live. Such a great motto for the slave turned soldier.

--Speaking of quotes, I've come across some great ones. The great Confederate cavalryman, Jeb Stuart is pissed off that his father-in-law has sided with the Union. Just before facing him in battle, Stuart remarks upon his father-in-law, "He'll regret it but once," Stuart vows. "And that will be continuously."

--Here is a thorough meditation on Glory and Gods and Generals from National Review.

--I recently saw Glory again, by the way. I liked it. But it was really, really clean. I don't mean that the battle wasn't gory enough--some dude's head got blown off. But everyone seemed to be wearing makeup, and there was no real sense of how much disease affected people's lives. It's amazing to think people died of diarrhea in those days. I thought the film should have had a more macabre feel. Also the House Nigger vs. Field Nigger thing felt really 20th century.

Uhh...

Via Andrew, this video is amazing. Here is Palin's "spokesperson." I think I have a better basketball analogy--If you're taken in the draft, don't appoint your boy as your agent.

What The Right Means When They Say "America"

UPDATE: Several posters have pointed out the distinction between the meritocratic and democratic ideal. I have conflated the two, and thus portions of this are wrong. Having thought on that fact though, I still can't bring myself to see Palin is one or Obama as the other. Perhaps this is my color barrier, but the promise of more "democratic" America never meant, to me, black people, their actual knowledge of the world be damned. It meant a fair shot.

That said, Ross is owed an apology--conflating the two changes the meaning. There is more here. But I want to think on it some more.

I need to quote at length from Ross's column today:

Palin's popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

This ideal has had a tough 10 months. It's been tarnished by Palin herself, obviously. With her missteps, scandals, dreadful interviews and self-pitying monologues, she's botched an essential democratic role -- the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.
But it's also been tarnished by the elites themselves, in the way that the media and political establishments have treated her.
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You'll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You'll endure gibes about your "slutty" looks and your "white trash concupiscence," while a prominent female academic declares that your "greatest hypocrisy" is the "pretense" that you're a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.
All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin's gender and her social class.
Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.
But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don't even think about it.

There is in this critique, a kind of Al Sharpton analysis--Sarah Palin as a stand-in for all of her social class. Ross contends that her failures are not her own, but somehow the failures that would afflict anyone else presumably from her "social class." But this only works if you think that most of working class America is as fucking inept as Sarah Palin.

There is more to be said about that, but I'd like to move to something more important--that being Ross's definition of "Anyone."

In the last ten months, we've seen the son of a single mother, son of an immigrant, roots in Kansas, roots in the quintessentially American South Side of Chicago, standing for the "traditional values" of family, and the lesson we take from this is is that American meritocracy is broken.

Conservative condescension toward working class America, works in tandem with racial blindness. I have tried, through a few re-readings, to avoid seeing that in Ross's column. But it's very difficult to process the notion that Sarah Palin is a better model of the all-American meritocratic ideal than Barack Obama, without believing that that judgment hinges on race.

My black readers are laughing at me. Again.

Continue reading "What The Right Means When They Say "America"" »

The Resignation

I wrote a long post on Sarah Palin, and then deleted it. I was overthinking. Here is what must be said-- Sarah Palin is deeply ignorant. She actually sounded worse, unedited and uninterrupted, than when she was under the withering fire of Katie Couric. One need only go to the text:

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports... basketball. I use it because you're naïve if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I'm doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it's time to pass the ball - for victory.

This is not off-the-cuff. It was prepared in advance, and, on video, it actually managed to make it sound worse. I just don't think there's much going on here except a deep-seated pride in a deep-seated ignorance. I don't know what else to say.

Continue reading "The Resignation" »

A People's History Of The Civil War

Anyone read this one? I bought it a couple weeks ago. Like most lefties, I read the Howard Zinn original in college. It changed my life, because before then I had this notion that only black people struggled. I knew a bit about women's suffrage, but very little about the labor movement. That said, I've grown a lot more skeptical toward explicitely polemical tellings of history. It's all polemical, to some extent. But I worry when I see it on top. And in the title.

July 2009 Archives

July 31, 2009

The Wisdom Of Jim Fallows

Songs That Aged Shockingly Well

Confederate Emancipation And Gay Marriage

Portraiture, Colonialism and Racism

Open Thread At Noon

Also Thursday At The Met

Songs That You Loved That May, In Fact, Suck

Erm, I'm Not Depressed

Teachable Moments

July 30, 2009

Thursday At The Met

Hard Numbers On Driving While Black

Open Thread At Noon

Megan Gets Married

The Civil War Report

Kelly Kapowski Is Too Busy

July 29, 2009

Lucia Whalen Speaks

Things All Nerd Fathers Must Do Before They Die Pt. 2

Things All Nerd Fathers Must Do Before They Die...

Wouldn't Want To Be In L.A. Right Now

Oh Right...

The Great Fantasy Debate

Nutso

On Yelling

Defining "Street"

July 28, 2009

I'll See Your Momma On NPR

The 911 Call

Open Thread At Noon

Party Like It's 1995

Ambushing The Birthers

July 27, 2009

What's A Lefty To Do?

Vick's Back

The Root Flooded With Racist Comments

Save The Children

A TNC Fantasy Football League?

Open Thread At Noon

Speaking Of Stupid

Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Vernon Forrest

July 25, 2009

Put Differently

July 24, 2009

...And Then I Read This

Oddly, This Made Me Feel Better

Where It All Leaves Us

Sorry Redskins Fans

The Gnomish Wind...

Cambridge Cops Press Conference

Open Thread At Noon

The Rage Of A Privileged Class

Don't Be The Next Contestant On That Summer-Jam Screen

A Little Perspective, Please

Ogletree On Gates

Stop Telling Me About The Racial-Profiling Course

July 23, 2009

Clarification On The Woman Who Called The Cops

So Exactly When Would You Call The Cops?

Open Thread At Noon

Cops And Pension

Jon Stewart On Birthers

Gatesgate

July 22, 2009

Incredible

Put Words Together Like Letterman

Giving Them More Rope

Jeff Goldberg Gets The Scoop On Conde Nast

Open Thread At Noon

On Gates

Clarifications On Yesterday

Taking My Self Way Too Seriously

July 21, 2009

The Limits Of Our Dialogue On Race And Beyond

Open Thread At Noon

Race In 2028

The Cowboys Pick Up A Receiver