Two-faced Progressives
04/24/08 08:53 AM
“Angry doesn't win general elections. It doesn't entice new voters into the process or beguile independents or heaven knows, invite Republican defections. But by definition, it has enormous negative power. And in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see how angry Hillary and her supporters really are.”
This is Slate’s Melinda Henneberger proving that she has in fact spent the past several decades in a hyperbaric chamber. Anger (and large dollops of fear) is exactly what has won elections at least since Nixon: Anger at the 60s social revolts and reforms; anger at minority advancement and the diminution of white privilege; anger at immigrants supposedly taking over America. Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America harnessed anger at a government “that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money” to reshape the political landscape.
Her attitude encapsulates the two-headed nature of the progressive response to the last eight years of Republican rule-by-lawbreaking. On the one hand, bloggers and progressive comments sections seethe with righteous fury at the various tramplings of the Constitution and international law. On the other, Democratic voters rejected John Edwards’ pugilistic campaign , deride Hillary Clinton supporters as insufficiently forgiving and frighteningly aggressive, and encourage Barack Obama’s more “above-it-all” inclinations.
Perhaps this is why, despite a Democratic congressional majority, we have utterly failed to even begin to end this war, or seriously investigate how we came to tolerate torture, or how various lobbyists have worked to systematically destroy public health and welfare safeguards. Do our lawmakers see that our anger is more display than heartfelt? Do they sense that we will not have their backs when the shit hits the fan and the pitchfork wielding opposition comes a-marching?
Do they sense that we just really don’t care that much; we just play like we do online? Do the mainstream media deride our Democratic political leaders as wusses who don’t really believe in anything enough to fight for it because… well, because that’s what they are and who they represent?
Revolutions are inevitably outgrowths of anger. The labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Reagan revolution—all of it (and note the greater effort and sacrifice the progressive revolutions require compared with the reactionary ones). Some Democrats seem to believe that—as in the high-tech and housing bubbles—old rules don’t apply and we no longer have to pay a price to gain the change we deem necessary. In this Oprah-fied age, the effortless group-hug, the miracle of “right thinking” will take care of it. Didn’t you read “The Secret”? Just believe…
Eventually those high-tech and housing bubbles burst, and we learned the hard way that some fundamentals do not change. We learned the hard way that—as in physics—movement comes at a cost.
I hope enough progressives—including our eventual Presidential nominee—learn this lesson in time. And I hope we progressives decide we’re willing to pay the price to get what we want.
Democrats: Killing the Republic With Kindness
04/20/08 07:46 AM
If the Pennsylvania debate proved one thing, it’s the state of the political landscape in which Democrats will compete come November. Unfortunately, we’re like the third act heroes on too many TV shows: The villain has tortured, raped and maimed the hero’s wife, child and pet hamster. The hero has the villain dead-to-rights. The villain sweats profusely, trembling in fear. Just then, the hero’s trusty sidekick steps in to whisper to the hero, “If you do it like this, you’re no better than he is.”
At that point, I’m screaming, “Smoke the Bastard!! Shoot! Shoooooot!!
I am deathly tired of the Democratic “we don’t want to win like that” attitude. I’m sick of being part of a party of losers with clean consciences. I want my Democratic candidates to out-lie, out-cheat and out-steal their Republican opponents. I want them to practice dog-whistle politics, send me private signals telling me that they don’t really mean a word they’re saying, and giving me confidence that their campaign soundbites are just lures for the mob. I want them to assume the asininity of the bulk of the mainstream television press corps (have you seen a TV news broadcast lately?) and use it as opposed to being used by it.
I know. I know. We’re trying to “take back the system.” We want a better press corps. I want to be 3 inches taller. That’s not going to happen either.
Is the presidential campaign the appropriate time to try to raise the political IQ of the body politic? Maybe it’s the perfect time, but only if you consider the “health of the Republic” more important than winning the Presidential election. At this stage, I don’t. (And any Republican who says that he does either spent the last eight years railing against the lies and atrocities of the Bush administration, or is a stone-cold liar.)
Al Gore thought more of the health of the Republic than he did of winning the election, and he was hugely praised for his grand sacrifice—conceding an election he may well have won. The cost in blood and treasure for his love of the Republic has been enormous. I hope a lot of other Americans join me in being unwilling to pay so high a price. Our Democratic congress does not aggressively investigate this administration’s potential crimes because we don’t want to disrupt the Republic. We are killing the Republic with our kindness.
Barack Obama said that Hillary Clinton was “in her element” during the Monty Python scripted debate. He said that she “twist(ed) the knife a little bit… that’s the lesson she learned when Republicans did it to her in the 1990s.”
Come August, I suggest he invest in chain mail and a blade. And when he has his knife at his political opponent’s throat, he had better grow the cajones to stick it in. If he does not, he will lose. My Gods. Imagine the price for that this time.
Obama Jerks the White Man's Burden
04/14/08 08:48 PM
This piece also
appears in Huffington Post's Off the
Bus.
The longer this race goes on, the closer I get to believing that, should he become the nominee, Republicans will beat Barack Obama like a death metal band’s bass drum.
They will have a lot of help—the media for starters—but as a black man, and one who has, despite a biracial background, openly allied himself with Afro-American culture, his candidacy picks at so many scabs on the American psyche that we’ll soon look in the mirror to witness a topography of blood and puss—a vision downright poxy.
The Pennsylvania “bitter” media orgy is just the beginning.
Case in point: In Slate Magazine, Mickey Kaus (who is stupid) quoted Ann Coulter (don’t even...) who dismissed Obama’s depiction of his grandmother’s racial attitudes. She did this based on her “deconstruction” of his autobiography. I, for one, am willing to believe that Obama knew his grandmother’s attitudes on race better than Ann Coulter. Kaus, by his inclusion of her comments, obviously believes otherwise. After all, she’s white.
Later in the same piece, Kaus (who gained no IQ points with the cognitive exercise of typing of subsequent paragraphs) accuses Obama of “condescension” in his race speech:
“…he explained white anger over welfare and affirmative action as a displacement of the bitterness that comes when whites ‘are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition ...’”
Since this is pretty much boilerplate social economics, Kaus’ umbrage seems to spring more from the uhm… nature of the messenger as opposed to the content of the message.
Case in point: Obama was attacked as “out of touch” for saying some stupidly phrased and purportedly condescending things about white working class voters—phrasing for which he has since apologized. Per the New York Times, he said of working class white voters who have fallen through the cracks:
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations…”
The “elitism” cry is a familiar attack against democratic candidates, but against Obama, it has more teeth. Against him, it strokes the taboo against black men criticizing white society and painting those that do as racially divisive. It invokes the classic “uppity Negro” archetype—a black man who dares to do what he has no right to do: in this case pontificate on the pathologies of white ones. If there’s one thing that these white working class voters are supposed to have and hold onto, it’s the fact that they’re better than him. For him to judge them… it violently upends an entire nation’s history. That’s why the print and cable bloviators are all over it.
Case in point: Tavis Smiley quit his radio gig on the outrageously popular Tom Joyner Morning Show because of all the “hate” the largely black audience aimed his way after he criticized Obama for failing to appear at his State of Black Union confab. From the sounds of things, Smiley was accused of nothing less than race treachery. When criticism of a candidate is read as traitorous, we’ve crossed the line from advocacy to politically suicidal groupthink on the part of a fair number of black voters wherein everything is secondary to the spectacle of racial solidarity and the potentially empty symbolism of a black man gaining the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s the mirror image of those white-ish Obama supporters more interested in proving their race-neutral progressive bona-fides than in picking a November winner (see Gary Kamiya’s Salon piece “It’s OK to vote for Obama because he’s black”).
It’s a toxic cocktail. A large slice of the democratic electorate (black and white) with something to prove to itself—a veritable circle jerk of self-satisfaction and moral superiority. It’s not that they want to engage in Obama’s vaunted “conversation about race.” It’s because, for differing reasons, they don’t want to; and they desperately pray that voting for Obama will obviate the need.
On the other hand, you have a media spasmodically (and largely unconsciously) dancing to the subtle tugs and pulls of marionette strings of a nation’s racial history—and taking the news-consuming electorate along for the ride.
At this point, nothing introduces race into this campaign more than Barack Obama’s face. Unless he pulls a Michael Jackson and erases it, race is on campaign menu to stay. When the subject becomes overt, we get solemn calls for a “national conversation” about it. Newsflash campers: This is America, and a national conversation about race is something that precious few—black or white—without a professional interest in it want to have. The subject is too ugly. It is too complex. And it is too painful.
It evokes a mirror-image that we don’t want to see; and right now I’m thinking we’ll vote for the right not to.
The longer this race goes on, the closer I get to believing that, should he become the nominee, Republicans will beat Barack Obama like a death metal band’s bass drum.
They will have a lot of help—the media for starters—but as a black man, and one who has, despite a biracial background, openly allied himself with Afro-American culture, his candidacy picks at so many scabs on the American psyche that we’ll soon look in the mirror to witness a topography of blood and puss—a vision downright poxy.
The Pennsylvania “bitter” media orgy is just the beginning.
Case in point: In Slate Magazine, Mickey Kaus (who is stupid) quoted Ann Coulter (don’t even...) who dismissed Obama’s depiction of his grandmother’s racial attitudes. She did this based on her “deconstruction” of his autobiography. I, for one, am willing to believe that Obama knew his grandmother’s attitudes on race better than Ann Coulter. Kaus, by his inclusion of her comments, obviously believes otherwise. After all, she’s white.
Later in the same piece, Kaus (who gained no IQ points with the cognitive exercise of typing of subsequent paragraphs) accuses Obama of “condescension” in his race speech:
“…he explained white anger over welfare and affirmative action as a displacement of the bitterness that comes when whites ‘are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition ...’”
Since this is pretty much boilerplate social economics, Kaus’ umbrage seems to spring more from the uhm… nature of the messenger as opposed to the content of the message.
Case in point: Obama was attacked as “out of touch” for saying some stupidly phrased and purportedly condescending things about white working class voters—phrasing for which he has since apologized. Per the New York Times, he said of working class white voters who have fallen through the cracks:
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations…”
The “elitism” cry is a familiar attack against democratic candidates, but against Obama, it has more teeth. Against him, it strokes the taboo against black men criticizing white society and painting those that do as racially divisive. It invokes the classic “uppity Negro” archetype—a black man who dares to do what he has no right to do: in this case pontificate on the pathologies of white ones. If there’s one thing that these white working class voters are supposed to have and hold onto, it’s the fact that they’re better than him. For him to judge them… it violently upends an entire nation’s history. That’s why the print and cable bloviators are all over it.
Case in point: Tavis Smiley quit his radio gig on the outrageously popular Tom Joyner Morning Show because of all the “hate” the largely black audience aimed his way after he criticized Obama for failing to appear at his State of Black Union confab. From the sounds of things, Smiley was accused of nothing less than race treachery. When criticism of a candidate is read as traitorous, we’ve crossed the line from advocacy to politically suicidal groupthink on the part of a fair number of black voters wherein everything is secondary to the spectacle of racial solidarity and the potentially empty symbolism of a black man gaining the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s the mirror image of those white-ish Obama supporters more interested in proving their race-neutral progressive bona-fides than in picking a November winner (see Gary Kamiya’s Salon piece “It’s OK to vote for Obama because he’s black”).
It’s a toxic cocktail. A large slice of the democratic electorate (black and white) with something to prove to itself—a veritable circle jerk of self-satisfaction and moral superiority. It’s not that they want to engage in Obama’s vaunted “conversation about race.” It’s because, for differing reasons, they don’t want to; and they desperately pray that voting for Obama will obviate the need.
On the other hand, you have a media spasmodically (and largely unconsciously) dancing to the subtle tugs and pulls of marionette strings of a nation’s racial history—and taking the news-consuming electorate along for the ride.
At this point, nothing introduces race into this campaign more than Barack Obama’s face. Unless he pulls a Michael Jackson and erases it, race is on campaign menu to stay. When the subject becomes overt, we get solemn calls for a “national conversation” about it. Newsflash campers: This is America, and a national conversation about race is something that precious few—black or white—without a professional interest in it want to have. The subject is too ugly. It is too complex. And it is too painful.
It evokes a mirror-image that we don’t want to see; and right now I’m thinking we’ll vote for the right not to.
Age, Disgracefully
04/10/08 06:13 AM
In today's LA Times
"Top of the Ticket" blog, Andrew Malcolm discusses
suspected fallout from Oprah Winfrey's aggressive
endorsement and campaigning for Barack Obama. He
mentions her age in the second paragraph (54).
Fine.
Later in the piece, he refers to her as "the aging empress of TV." Now since when does the mainstream media consider 54 to be the onset of decrepitude? Tim Russert is in his late 50s. I don't recall seeing him referred to as "the aging emperor of political TV." The very idea seems laughable.
Only a woman would be called out--accused, as it were--of "aging" due to turning 54. Aimed at women, "aging" is an epithet, somewhere just south of "bitch."
A blogger once noted a pundit referring to Mitt Romney (60) as a "young man." He then wondered why no one had yet called Hillary Clinton a "young woman."
We call it "Rampant Sexism."
Later in the piece, he refers to her as "the aging empress of TV." Now since when does the mainstream media consider 54 to be the onset of decrepitude? Tim Russert is in his late 50s. I don't recall seeing him referred to as "the aging emperor of political TV." The very idea seems laughable.
Only a woman would be called out--accused, as it were--of "aging" due to turning 54. Aimed at women, "aging" is an epithet, somewhere just south of "bitch."
A blogger once noted a pundit referring to Mitt Romney (60) as a "young man." He then wondered why no one had yet called Hillary Clinton a "young woman."
We call it "Rampant Sexism."
Richard Cohen Has a Race Problem
04/08/08 07:44 AM
The following
appears in Pop and
Politics.
It has become obvious that Richard Cohen will not be satisfied until Barack Obama joins the Klan. Until then, the fact that some (and perhaps more than "some") whites won’t vote for him due to his skin color will remain Obama’s own fault. Per Cohen’s column in the Washington Post it is Obama’s responsibility to make “some” whites comfortable with his blackness by assuring them that he shares their distaste for darkies.
Cohen wrote:
“My guess is that he [Obama] still has not put the race issue to rest -- maybe because he failed to do what Kennedy did in West Virginia. In that speech, Kennedy told Protestant West Virginians that when presidents took the oath of office, they were swearing to the separation of church and state. A president who breaks that oath is not only committing an impeachable offense, he said, 'but he is committing a sin against God.' In other words, he told West Virginians that their major fear was baseless.
“Obama in his Philadelphia speech said nothing as dramatic. On the contrary, when it came to the perceived threat posed by young black men (one out of every nine is in criminal custody), Obama built a fence around the issue by citing his grandmother's 'fear of black men who passed her by on the street' -- suggesting it was comparable to what his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had said. He did not confront white fears. Instead, he implied that they were illegitimate.”
Simply breathtaking.
First, this suggests that black America and its concerns are monolithic institution with written rules and regulations to which all must pay fealty, and which run counter to US interests. Talk about irrational, racist and divisive fears!
He then likens white fear of black men (which he attributes entirely to black criminality as opposed to throwing in the stiffer penalties for blacks vs. whites) to concern that a Catholic would follow the church’s written dictates as opposed to the Constitution’s. The man’s inability to construct a rational metaphor suggests a serious IQ deficit. Per the Bell Curve, perhaps he has some hidden black blood in him.
“He did not confront white fears,” wrote Cohen. And how would he do that? Per his analogy, only by assuring America that he would not rape their women or jack their cars.
Only by attacking blacks, by suggesting that racist attitudes toward us are justified, as Cohen obviously believes they are, can Obama lay the race question to rest.
There’ll be a cross-burnin’ at the Obama rally tonight! Y’all come!
It has become obvious that Richard Cohen will not be satisfied until Barack Obama joins the Klan. Until then, the fact that some (and perhaps more than "some") whites won’t vote for him due to his skin color will remain Obama’s own fault. Per Cohen’s column in the Washington Post it is Obama’s responsibility to make “some” whites comfortable with his blackness by assuring them that he shares their distaste for darkies.
Cohen wrote:
“My guess is that he [Obama] still has not put the race issue to rest -- maybe because he failed to do what Kennedy did in West Virginia. In that speech, Kennedy told Protestant West Virginians that when presidents took the oath of office, they were swearing to the separation of church and state. A president who breaks that oath is not only committing an impeachable offense, he said, 'but he is committing a sin against God.' In other words, he told West Virginians that their major fear was baseless.
“Obama in his Philadelphia speech said nothing as dramatic. On the contrary, when it came to the perceived threat posed by young black men (one out of every nine is in criminal custody), Obama built a fence around the issue by citing his grandmother's 'fear of black men who passed her by on the street' -- suggesting it was comparable to what his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had said. He did not confront white fears. Instead, he implied that they were illegitimate.”
Simply breathtaking.
First, this suggests that black America and its concerns are monolithic institution with written rules and regulations to which all must pay fealty, and which run counter to US interests. Talk about irrational, racist and divisive fears!
He then likens white fear of black men (which he attributes entirely to black criminality as opposed to throwing in the stiffer penalties for blacks vs. whites) to concern that a Catholic would follow the church’s written dictates as opposed to the Constitution’s. The man’s inability to construct a rational metaphor suggests a serious IQ deficit. Per the Bell Curve, perhaps he has some hidden black blood in him.
“He did not confront white fears,” wrote Cohen. And how would he do that? Per his analogy, only by assuring America that he would not rape their women or jack their cars.
Only by attacking blacks, by suggesting that racist attitudes toward us are justified, as Cohen obviously believes they are, can Obama lay the race question to rest.
There’ll be a cross-burnin’ at the Obama rally tonight! Y’all come!
Wake Me From King’s Dream; And Spare Me the 60s-bred Alternatives
04/05/08 01:18 PM
The following
appears in Pop and
Politics.
I’ve grown tired of the self-serving and sanctimonious invocations of “King’s Dream.” Since his death, it’s reference has been mired in cheap sentiment and easy virtue, recognizable to the daytime TV chat show set accustomed to camera-induced catharsis and the promises of fulfillment just awaiting those who “buy this book” and follow “these easy steps.”
King’s “I have a Dream” speech was no shorcut to racial harmony. It was no paean to the inherent goodness of white people or black ones. It did not state that all black and white people had to do was look into their inherently pure souls and express them, and all would be well. It was a rageful, conflicted work of genius:
"Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice."
“Demand,” he said; not “request.”
"This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality."
As elegant a threat as ever posed. King then went on to catalogue some of the injustices to which he’d alluded. And then he spoke of his dream in terms that both soared, and dripped with contempt.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
And then the overtly Christian imagery emerged:
"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'"
A Christian preacher born in 1929, King was raised on a theology of the risen Jesus, presented as a blonde, blue-eyed white man, the son of the one true God. He would not have known that science would soon show that the human animal (black, white and brown) to be biologically predisposed to associate the negative with those that do not look like them—predisposed to prejudice. He would not have known that research from Olsson et al., reported in Science Magazine would show that:
"…white participants acquired more persistent conditioned fears in response to pictures of black faces than to pictures of white faces when the faces were paired with an aversive (repellant) stimulus, whereas the opposite was true for black participants."
King never stated that the fulfillment of his dream would be seamless, effortless or inevitable. Those are assumptions that his myriad “interpreters” have foisted onto him. He never elucidated what steps it would take to make the dream more of a reality. He simply articulated what was by definition a somewhat unrealistic ideal. Only in our The Secret-fueled modern sensibility is every dream easily attainable—if you buy the right book and follow “these simple steps.”
In King’s time, black Christianity had long been force-fed the image of the white son of a white God. Christianity fueled by such images might bestow super-human powers of righteousness upon whites. After all, they most resembled God and his offspring. While black theologians have diligently chipped away at this image of a white God, history is a living thing and the mainstream culture is omnipresent, and that image remains among its mainstays.
Perhaps this helps explains why, in 1996, columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, “We've spent 387 years in this country trying to get white folks to love us. Might help if we first learned to love ourselves.” That’s difficult if echoes of the very God you worship looks like those who enslaved and reviled you for hundreds of years. It is very difficult when competing attempts to engender that self-love, like the Black Power Movement, betray a loathing of the enslaved people we have been, as opposed to a pride in what we have made of the experience—the forms of worship, speech, music, art, letters, and political action that, should we ever free ourselves from the shackles of 60s liberation models, might form the basis of an empowering, self-determined culture second-to-none.
In his book “Risks of Faith,” black theologian James H. Cole, a major influence on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, defined “black power” as follows:
"…full emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary. The methods may include selective buying, boycotting, marching, or even rebellion.”
Sensibly, part of Cole’s emancipation prescription was freedom from the image of a God that looked like our historic oppressors. However, Cole’s black power movement imagined only two routes to black self-determination. They were “accommodation” or “protest.” Both are self-defeating because they look outward and accept as a given mainstream cultural supremacy. They accept white power as so overwhelming, that it can only be acceded to or violently rejected. They paint black American culture as so powerless that it can only flee or be eaten—the reaction of powerless prey pursued by large-toothed predators.
Cultures that sustain and empower their inhabitants provide a sense of entitlement, and even superiority to those who nestle within them. According to University of Kentucky psychologist Margot Monteith, “To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It's likely a built-in mechanism." If you must flee or be eaten by something, you are essentially powerless against it. Powerlessness does not breed a “sense of entitlement.” It breeds what Cecil Brown described as “negative protest:”
"...a raging, ferocious, uncool, demoralized black boy banging on the immaculate door of White Society, begging, not so much for political justice as for his own identity, and in the process, consuming himself, so that in the final analysis, his destiny is at the mercy of the White Man.”
Whether the modern invocations of King’s dream, or re-imaginings of traditional Black Power movements, 60s models of black liberation and self-determination are as functional in the 21st century as their august and entombed originators. Is it any wonder books hold titles like The End of Blackness, and pollsters ask if blacks of differing socio-economic status are part of the “same race.”
It’s a portrait of a people seeking our “own identity,” and looking backwards in all wrong places.
I’ve grown tired of the self-serving and sanctimonious invocations of “King’s Dream.” Since his death, it’s reference has been mired in cheap sentiment and easy virtue, recognizable to the daytime TV chat show set accustomed to camera-induced catharsis and the promises of fulfillment just awaiting those who “buy this book” and follow “these easy steps.”
King’s “I have a Dream” speech was no shorcut to racial harmony. It was no paean to the inherent goodness of white people or black ones. It did not state that all black and white people had to do was look into their inherently pure souls and express them, and all would be well. It was a rageful, conflicted work of genius:
"Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice."
“Demand,” he said; not “request.”
"This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality."
As elegant a threat as ever posed. King then went on to catalogue some of the injustices to which he’d alluded. And then he spoke of his dream in terms that both soared, and dripped with contempt.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
And then the overtly Christian imagery emerged:
"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'"
A Christian preacher born in 1929, King was raised on a theology of the risen Jesus, presented as a blonde, blue-eyed white man, the son of the one true God. He would not have known that science would soon show that the human animal (black, white and brown) to be biologically predisposed to associate the negative with those that do not look like them—predisposed to prejudice. He would not have known that research from Olsson et al., reported in Science Magazine would show that:
"…white participants acquired more persistent conditioned fears in response to pictures of black faces than to pictures of white faces when the faces were paired with an aversive (repellant) stimulus, whereas the opposite was true for black participants."
King never stated that the fulfillment of his dream would be seamless, effortless or inevitable. Those are assumptions that his myriad “interpreters” have foisted onto him. He never elucidated what steps it would take to make the dream more of a reality. He simply articulated what was by definition a somewhat unrealistic ideal. Only in our The Secret-fueled modern sensibility is every dream easily attainable—if you buy the right book and follow “these simple steps.”
In King’s time, black Christianity had long been force-fed the image of the white son of a white God. Christianity fueled by such images might bestow super-human powers of righteousness upon whites. After all, they most resembled God and his offspring. While black theologians have diligently chipped away at this image of a white God, history is a living thing and the mainstream culture is omnipresent, and that image remains among its mainstays.
Perhaps this helps explains why, in 1996, columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, “We've spent 387 years in this country trying to get white folks to love us. Might help if we first learned to love ourselves.” That’s difficult if echoes of the very God you worship looks like those who enslaved and reviled you for hundreds of years. It is very difficult when competing attempts to engender that self-love, like the Black Power Movement, betray a loathing of the enslaved people we have been, as opposed to a pride in what we have made of the experience—the forms of worship, speech, music, art, letters, and political action that, should we ever free ourselves from the shackles of 60s liberation models, might form the basis of an empowering, self-determined culture second-to-none.
In his book “Risks of Faith,” black theologian James H. Cole, a major influence on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, defined “black power” as follows:
"…full emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary. The methods may include selective buying, boycotting, marching, or even rebellion.”
Sensibly, part of Cole’s emancipation prescription was freedom from the image of a God that looked like our historic oppressors. However, Cole’s black power movement imagined only two routes to black self-determination. They were “accommodation” or “protest.” Both are self-defeating because they look outward and accept as a given mainstream cultural supremacy. They accept white power as so overwhelming, that it can only be acceded to or violently rejected. They paint black American culture as so powerless that it can only flee or be eaten—the reaction of powerless prey pursued by large-toothed predators.
Cultures that sustain and empower their inhabitants provide a sense of entitlement, and even superiority to those who nestle within them. According to University of Kentucky psychologist Margot Monteith, “To the extent we can feel better about our group relative to other groups, we can feel good about ourselves. It's likely a built-in mechanism." If you must flee or be eaten by something, you are essentially powerless against it. Powerlessness does not breed a “sense of entitlement.” It breeds what Cecil Brown described as “negative protest:”
"...a raging, ferocious, uncool, demoralized black boy banging on the immaculate door of White Society, begging, not so much for political justice as for his own identity, and in the process, consuming himself, so that in the final analysis, his destiny is at the mercy of the White Man.”
Whether the modern invocations of King’s dream, or re-imaginings of traditional Black Power movements, 60s models of black liberation and self-determination are as functional in the 21st century as their august and entombed originators. Is it any wonder books hold titles like The End of Blackness, and pollsters ask if blacks of differing socio-economic status are part of the “same race.”
It’s a portrait of a people seeking our “own identity,” and looking backwards in all wrong places.
Honorary White or "Just Happens to be Black"
04/05/08 10:00 AM
“…one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as ‘doctors’ rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as ‘blacks.’
- Nicholas D. Kristof
“… Obama has unwittingly enhanced his image as the African American candidate – as opposed to being just a remarkable candidate who happens to be black.”
- Robert Novak
Kristof points to, and Novak then makes a common distinction. Novak distinguishes between an “African-American X,” and an “X who Just Happens to be African American.” It seems that in order for the majority to consider you an X Who Just Happens to Be African-American versus an African-American X, you have to work very hard. Despite the fact that your African-Americanness is telegraphed all over your body, your task is to assure the majority that the fact of your skin color, having been raised as a minority in America with it, having been all of your life associated with the dominant Afro-American sub-culture surrounding it… your job is to assure your judges (and all who claim to speak for the majority are, rightfully, your judges) that none of that has made any difference whatsoever in your outlook, point-of-view, or allegiances. You must assure them that you think, perceive and behave just like “regular” [read “white”] Americans. Only then can you be considered an X Who Just Happens to Be African American, versus the dreaded African-American X.
So I’ve been trying to decide if, in the eyes of my white judges, I am the dreaded, lesser Black Man, or if I have achieved the august status of Just Happening to Be Black. Hmmm. I was raised around white people. I’ve lived and studied next to them. I competed and fought with them. I’ve loved, eaten and even slept with them throughout my life. I went to Harvard and my command of mainstream culture rivals that of the vast majority of my countrymen. My speech is unaccented. So far, so good. I’m feeling better about myself already.
But I am also devotee of Afro-American history and culture. My outlook on everything from matters spiritual to political to interpersonal have been formed by the fact of being African-American, and more specifically, Afro-American (the American descendant of African slaves). So, while on first blush, my judges might think I am that rare, sought after racial Unicorn—the Man Who Just Happens to Be African-American, in fact, on slightly deeper examination, I will be exposed as the lesser African-American Man and accordingly reviled. Oh my!
This might lead to a personal meltdown. I write; so am I a Black Writer, or am I the much better Writer Who Just Happens to Be Black? Does it depend on what I’m writing? Right now, I’m writing about racial issues, so I guess I’m a Black Writer as opposed to a Writer Who Happens to Be Black. But Novak was writing about racial issues too. Because he was writing about black people is he White Writer, or a White Writer Who Happens to Be Black? But perhaps, being white, the whole question moot since the question itself presupposes the majority (in this case white) outlook as a baseline, a norm, the constant from which all else aberrantly deviates.
Becoming what white people want us to be—People Who Just Happen to Be Black seems to require an extraordinary amount of self-negation, a sort of reverse therapy process. As opposed to coming to terms with our past and the influences that formed us, we are to do the opposite. We are to deny them—our history, our parents, their histories, our siblings, and their experiences as well as our own. Only then are we worthy of the majority’s trust.
During apartheid, South Africa allowed certain blacks to gain special status by bestowing upon them the status of “Honorary White.” We now bestow special status on those anointed “Just Happens to Be Black.”
What’s the difference?