I Am Not Amused

I am not amused.

I actually felt something come over me yesterday when I saw Wolf Blitzer breathing anxiously into his microphone as he wondered why the eight missionaries being held under suspicion of child trafficking violations who were released from the custody of the Haitian government yesterday were quickly spirited away from the island in a U.S. government plane.

It was as if all the inequities, all the preferential treatment, all the institutionalized racism I have been researching for a mini-series on race and perspective had come to a boil just behind my eyes. It was a sudden throbbing pressure just behind my sinus cavity that seemed to ratchet itself up a notch with every connection that popped into my head between what I was seeing on the screen about the privilege of whiteness, what I have been reading about the privilege of whiteness, and what we all already know but willfully choose to ignore that makes racial inequality at once so insidious and so apparent that rooting it out requires no less than a reworking of the very foundation of our entire social structure.

I feel as if I am listening to mad men when I hear reporters casually talk about the prior life of the murdering professor in Huntsville as if the shooting incident this same murdering professor had been involved in, a prior  incident that resulting in her having a dead brother was the kind of thing that was merely "eyebrow raising". It was a heinous incident in which the police report alone recounted so much circumstantial evidence that a first year law student at the bottom of his class could have gotten an indictment. It was a situation where the ruling of a local police chief WHO HAD DONE NO INVESTIGATION allowed the murdering professor in her prior life to simply walk out of the police station WITHOUT A CHARGE -- a textbook example of the privilege whiteness brings in America, and one my news media and the rest of the country have chosen to ignore, as if this literal "get out of jail free" card is one we all carry.

It is as if we brown skinned people have been trapped in a classroom with mad professors, a group of men and women whose sage faces house wild eyes, wild eyes that blink incessantly as these professors tap their chalk against the board, insisting that in these cases there really is no inequity, that we are seeing things, that we must not question their assertions that “2 + 2 = 5”, that “8 ÷ 2 = 3”, or that “3 × 2 =7”, even though we can see by simply counting with our fingers that these things are not true.

It is as if these professors are telling us “your fingers are lying to you”, even as we see them arrive at the same conclusion we do before they remember to add or subtract a finger to support what they’ve written on the board.

Even now, I can imagine that there are people all over America who have been harboring resentment at the way those “poor missionaries” have been treated. That there are people all over America who have already deduced from their armchairs in Whiteland that the murdering professor “needed help”, was “off her medication”, “didn’t really know what she was doing”, “probably was abused as a child” or whatever comes next on the laundry list of excuses that seem to arrive like clockwork whenever white Americans who don’t look like they came out of a trailer park commit heinous acts.

That throbbing in my head was compounded by the virtual lynch mob that has lit out after Governor David Patterson’s aide, a six foot seven inch tall black man named David Johnson who has been accused on more than one occasion of domestic violence, and was arrested over twenty years ago for selling crack cocaine to an undercover agent as a teenager. In case you don’t know what that really means, I’ll fill you in – the police didn’t arrest a future Scarface, they arrested a misdirected kid who was trying to peddle twenty or thirty dollars worth of crack rocks, the kind of drug possession charge suburban criminal lawyers where I live get thrown out every day of the week when they are levied against their prep school clients.

This is the point in the narrative, though, where those same people who are so sympathetic to the child stealers and the brother killer fall back on that shop worn racial stand in for the original "its them niggers" these days -- the label "he's just a thug" -- and start wondering why the police don’t “throw away the key” when they lock up people like this and just keep them in jail for life.

The throbbing intensified as I realized that this horror show would be on tomorrow and the next night, that it was the only show going, a perpetual stage production titled "Angels and Demons", in which I and my brownskinned brethren were destined to play the Demons, no matter how much good we might accomplish, no matter how much trouble we might avoid, while our white skinned counterparts were perennial Angels, no matter how much blood drenched their hands, no matter how many died because of their willful acts, no matter what law they broke or ignored.

The throbbing has eased a little now that I’ve written this, but I will imagine that it will return whenever I click on the next internet link or turn on the TV to hear the mad professors insist yet again that ”2 + 2 = 5”, even as we watch the blood stains dry on the hands of another Angel gone bad.

Racial Discrimination: The Reality Show Version

Watching the cable news pundits on TV make their obligatory references to African Americans, race, and racism these last few days, many of them as casually as if they were checking off a "to do" list at the grocery store, I wondered - what actually goes through the mind of someone who is NOT a descendant of a historically oppressed minority when they think about discrimination?

Even if you have watched Roots and the PBS specials on Jim Crow and the network specials on the civil rights movement, it was and is more of an "outsider looking in" kind of experience if you weren't black. American culture has been very good at de-emphasizing this part of our history, transmogrifying these human horror stories into a type of temporary racial exile, its effects to be sloughed off as easily as a non-slave descendant forgets about a traffic ticket they've paid.

So I figured, since we have reality shows about everything else - why not one that details the way racial discrimination has affected the African American's perspective of the American dream over the years? One that flips the script, the way they do on shows like Wife Swap, except on this show, the show's premise flip flops the entire U.S. population, shrinking the number of whites and multiplying the number of blacks:

Imagine that you have volunteered to pretend you are a slave for a reality show where black people are the slave owners - you are unable to read and chronically hungry and run down from the substandard food you eat. 

The blacks are all armed with shotguns to be holstered in a quiver on their backs for instant access, and .22 pistols, which they are required to keep cocked at all times. The black people have been instructed to shoot at the whites randomly, while they were working, or eating, or resting during the day, nicking a toe here, a forearm there, an ear here, laughing all the while.

The black people have also been instructed to draw their shotguns from their holsters at least three or four times a week, to remind their slaves why they put up with being shot at with the smaller gun all the time. Subliminal tapes play in the slave huts at night, tapes that reconstruct your past, explaining to you that all of your forbears had been treated the same way, that they had passed down secrets on how to turn sideways so that the bullets wouldn’t take off the entire earlobe, that you really didn’t need ten toes anyway...and that in the afterlife, if you were somehow lucky, and the masters fucked up their aim and shot you in the heart or the head, you might finally get to stop hearing the constant pop of those pistols, might finally get to stop worrying about how that shotgun blast would feel in your back if you had ever decided to run.

The subliminal voices would switch gears about four a.m., shifting into a frenetic sing song cadence as they reminded you vociferously that your future would be no better than your past, that this life as you know it would exist for all time, that for you, unceaseless toil and weariness were the best you could ever hope to achieve, the best that your children, and your children's children could hope to achieve. As the show’s season progressed, you would be emancipated.

You would be happy for a little while, until you realized that you were working for the same black folks that you were before, only now they paid you a few coppers...a few coppers they would get back when you paid them rent on the same shacks you used to live in for free. Most of you still wouldn't be able to read. Most of you wouldn't even believe you were really free - after all, those black folks would still be allowed to shoot at you with those .22's. 

Jim Crow would change the rules a little – the shotguns would still be there, but now the blacks would have to account for all the shells they discharged. The .22's would be exchanged for BB guns, and all day long you would feel the pock pock pock of the little copper pellets biting into your skin. Every once in awhile one would hit one of you in the eye, maiming you for life. Your skin, after years of pelting, would actually become thicker, until you felt like you were wearing a second coat of skin. You would learn to keep your head down to protect your eyes. You'd learn to keep your mouth shut to keep from getting your teeth chipped. And even with all those precautions, and all of those adaptations, there would still be the danger of life threatening infections in those tender areas that were not callused against this constant daily onslaught.

Concentrating on things like learning to read well enough to refuse to sign one sided legal agreements, learning to count well enough to understand how much that twenty five percent interest rate on your second hand car was costing you, or getting your faculties clear enough to compare the cost of your industrial life insurance policy with whole life insurance would have taken more energy than you had to give after battling those BB's all day. 

In the sixties and seventies, just before the last episode, in a dramatic show of racial reconciliation, all the black oppressors would lay down their weapons on the ground in front of you, just to show you ex-slaves that they could now be trusted. Not because they really wanted to, but because the government made them do it. But with such a huge undertaking, it would be impossible to collect each and every weapon. And there would be quite a few blacks who would secrete BB's in their pockets, intending to continue throwing them at you by hand, because...well, because that's just what they had always done it. 

The eighties and nineties, the decades that would comprise the big finale, would show the black people inviting you and your newly educated, conservatively dressed brethren into their highrises offices, country club dining rooms, and even their gated communities - not in huge numbers, but enough for you to see they were at least trying to make a difference. The blacks would watch the you like hawks to see if you had retained any of those tendencies your kind were known to succumb to, if no one was watching you. 

And every once in awhile, just when you had gotten used to this new life, one of those damn BB's would ping you out of nowhere, just when you least expected it. Even now, at the cast reunion show that is set in the new millennium, though you haven't been startled by the ping of a BB or the sound of a .22 or the frenetic sing song cadence of those subliminal voices in awhile - even though you know the black people around you were simply playing their parts, acting according to the script, you are still on the alert against any of the abuse you had to suffer through on the show.

To run this type of gauntlet of perpetual psychological abuse and come out whole, in need of only a Tony Robbins tape or a few faith - based counseling sessions to deprogram yourself from recoiling at the sound of a BB hitting the floor would be unrealistic. To equate this racial ignominy to a traffic violation of sorts, the record of racial discrimination to be wiped clean because the judge simply threw the case out, would insinuate that this was an offense committed against individuals instead of an entire community.

[This was originally posted July 30th, 2009 - you can thank Chris Matthews of MSNBC for its resurrection]

Brown Man Gets Michelle Malkin's Goat

One of my previous posts, the tongue-in-cheek bit of humor I whipped up last week titled When Are White People Going To Stop Looking For A Handout?, has struck a nerve out there in the blogosphere, partly because I took great pleasure in insulting Michelle Malkin in the piece, but mostly because it took the twisted logic of the age-old conservative chestnut "when are black people going to stop waiting for a handout?" and flipped the script.

Angry visitors have been coming to Brown Man Thinking Hard in droves since yesterday to leave their two cents worth of opinions about the sharply barbed bon mots that were liberally sprinkled through this satirical piece.

People like these become some of the most thin-skinned beings on the planet when one of the aphorisms they have concocted and perpetuated over the years is altered with the substitution of one word - "white" - in a way that points out just how absurd the original version has become. All of a sudden, the phrase isn't so funny anymore.

The even sadder thing about all of this is how political blowhards like Malkin can prostitute the Republican Party party the way she does, in effect turning the party's principles, which are simple, human scale ones, into caricatures of themselves, the same way rappers exaggerate what it’s like to live in the 'hood.

My parents taught me to be a good host, though, even when your guests are prone to act up. So if you folks who are sightseeing really want to know what the Brown Man is all about, feel free to read through the archives here. There are over a hundred thousand originally produced words in the 300 odd posts here that demonstrate the commitment this Brown Man has made to expand the political narrative in this country beyond the binary version that is currently popularized on TV and in the press.

A good place to start, if I were a hostile visitor who was looking for more racially oriented material by that uppity, thinks he's smarter than us Kris Broughton to complain to my buddies about is the four part series I did last year, White Americans and The Politics of Race. I'd print it all out, get a good cup of coffee, and let 'er rip - if you don't read anything else here, this is the series I would say is a must.

Rush The Magic Ego is a little more intimate, with a few revelations about Kris Broughton's background that might surprise those of you hostile visitors who automatically think "Democrat" and "liberal" when you run into African Americans.

Don’t let the title to Aaahh! Mandingo Is Running The Country scare you – it is really a thoughtful meditation about those who pine for the nostalgia of a Norman Rockwell version America. A version, Kris Broughton is happy to announce, that will not be coming back.

I know a lot of you who might be coming over here are more used to the high pitched sounds of parrot chirping than the low, melodic, practically silent resonance associated with deep thinking, so take it slow. Think of this site like a library – you can come in anytime you want to check out a selection for free. Even if you don't agree with me, or look like me, I can guarantee that you will learn something here if you wander through enough of these archives.

Tell Michelle I said hello.



Brown Man

AKA

Kris Broughton

African Americanness Becoming Unbound

How do you know when the narrative on race is expanding? When Campbell Brown and Lou Dobbs start to look indignant because the black, brown or yellow person they are talking to steps outside of the boundaries commentators like them have come to see as "acceptable" when talking about intraracial issues.

I was just finishing my dinner last night when I heard the guest on Campbell Brown’s No Bull, No Bias show, a white male historian, sputter on about the "incendiary" nature of the word "coward" that Eric Holder used the other day during a Black History Month speech to describe Americans who shy away from talking about racial differences.


What made my head snap around was this sentence:

"Holder - he's a nice enough guy. He has an unusual background. I would have confirmed him right away."

delivered by the historian with the kind of exasperated petulance, the sort of irritated and annoyed scowl that says "my people really make the rules around here."


How do you do that?


How do you appropriate the power to choose the Attorney General of the United States, even in a hyped for TV conversation, so easily?


The back and forth between the historian and Roland Martin, who was doing a live remote from a black journalists convention, was predictable, as was Campbell’s eye rolling when she felt that Roland was "getting out of hand". As I turned off the TV, I wondered - "how long is it going to take before Campbell Brown and the historian on her show and the rest of the inhabitants of Pale Nation, that stubborn subset of white Americans who still feel like they are doing all of us minorities a favor by letting us breathe the same air they do, realize that the feeling of discomboulation they have is going to be permanent?"

I don't know about anybody else, but these days, I feel like my peripheral view is wider than the thing I'm looking at, as if the object's image has shrunk a little, enough for me to see what there is behind it. Influence shapers like Mrs. Brown and Mr. Dobbs, who look as though the boundaries of our political narrative has gotten away from them, are more transparent. It doesn't matter what euphemism you want to use - the cat is out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube, the bird has flown the coop - African Americanness is in the process of becoming unbounded, a phenomenon that will demand some sort of transformation from all of us.

America Is Finally Growing Up

Inaugurating Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America was like being in a civil rights march without an opposing force; like watching the Apollo moon landing without the need for a telescope; like the end of apartheid, with all of the tears of joy.

America is finally growing up. When we all can acknowledge our entire history, not just the attractive parts, when we all can accept completely the existence of perverse injustices that dominated our pasts - when the entire story of where we came from and how we got to here as a nation is recognized, fully and without restraint - the affirmations we cry out in celebration will ring truer, and the declarations we shout to the rooftops in commemoration shall carry more weight than they ever have before.

Indentured servitude, slavery, segregation, integration - Black America 5.0 is upon us, but even as it includes all of these things, it is bound by none of them. Collaboration is the last mile, the final steps in this journey to be equally accepted into all aspects of American life. Black America 5.0 will be tricky - there are going to be times, in fact, when you will wonder where you end and the rest of the world begins.

Change is good. But it is not quite as simple as flipping a switch in a dark room, instantly turning on the light. I don't know exactly what the steps are that we need to take to travel this final mile, or what order they need to be executed in, or how much the process will demand of us. But what I do know is two things: it will take the willingness and determination of the majority of this country to get there, and we already have all the tools we need right now to get started today.

Congratulations, America, on reaching a milestone for the ages.

The Best Email I Got Yesterday

I haven't really slept at all for the last couple of days - an hour here, a couple of hours there - and it is finally starting to catch up with me. Consequently this Brown Man's thinking is starting to go a little soft, even as I feel a wellspring of new ideas coursing through my head, words and phrases that are begging to to be captured by my keyboard.

Tonight, I will actually turn the TV off and sleep in a bed.

But before I do that, I have to share something I got from one of my frequent visitors. Her original email just came out of the blue, a very nice "attaboy" that added fuel to last nights fervor.

dear brownmanthinking:

i want to thank you for your thoughtful writing as we approached this historic day. you are partly responsible for my getting off my butt and putting my money and time where my heart's desire is.

this country will, i hope, be on a new road when the sun rises on wednesday, november 5, 2008.

cheers,

karen

So I asked her to elaborate, so I could include her story in the posts I was sending to TV One. They didn't use it, but I liked it so much, I feel I have to share it. The story Karen tells is why I struggle mightily with my imperfect original drafts to make sure that the pieces I post here speak directly and clearly and passionately to all of you.

dear kris:

i am a 51-year-old "white" female and i live in fall river, massachusetts (if i tip out of my chair, i'm in rhode island, and i'm originally from white plains, new york, via connecticut, nigeria, saudi arabia and boston). although i have worked as a poll worker in three elections over the past 20 years, i have never donated to a political campaign before and never volunteered to work in any capacity for a campaign.

this election things are different. i have contributed money and time to senator obama's campaign.

i seek out blogs with good content, not based on racial, sexual or religious orientation. i don't remember exactly when it was that i first found your blog through a link from somewhere else but it was after the democratic primary had narrowed to clinton and obama. what has kept me coming back is that you made me feel that we are part of the same community. you shared the joys and difficulties and concerns of this important election. you expressed skepticism and frustration without bitterness and with humor. you are realistic in your expectations of other people. i see those same attributes in senator obama.

race is such a tricky issue. am i really as colorblind as i think i am? i like to think so. despite the name of your blog, i don't think of you as a black man, i think of you as someone with something relevant to say. the historic nature of senator obama's candidacy given his skin color is something to be celebrated, but i am not voting for him because of his race, i am voting for him because of the content of his mind and his character. at the same time that i am voting for senator obama, i am voting for you and me and the dozens of people i have met on the internet and in "real life" throughout the last six months -- people who i believe hold the same things dear and are willing to make that effort to build a better community, a better america, a better world.

i don't think i have really said well what is in my heart because it is so full at this point and i cannot stop worrying until the next president has been announced, but i hope i have in some small way communicated what i'm thinking.

please dear god, if you exist, make my dearest hope a reality.

karen
fall river, massachusetts

Thank you, Karen.

And thank you to everyone else who comes here regularly to see what this Brown Man has to say.

New Sheriff In Town

For the next 72 hours, I am deputizing all of the visitors to my blog. Deputies, if you hear anyone within earshot of you use the phrase “post-racial”, you are authorized to use lethal levels of logic and common sense to forcibly badger, cajole, or harass these mental midgets into admitting that the intricacies of race in America have not simply disappeared over night.

Some of the more calculating political pundits on the cable news shows began reframing the narrative from “can he do it?” to “how he should be doing it” before Barack Obama and his family left the stage at Grant Field. Because they know what I know – the only way they will be able to shape the Obama narrative going forward is to get out in front of the president-elect before he gets out in front of too many microphones.

There are two things Obama did yesterday that show just how much his presence will mean to our entire nation’s growth towards this post-racial utopia we all dream about. The first was his statement as he cast his vote in Chicago. “This is a downpayment on Dr. King’s dream.”

The second was the point in his victory speech where he pointed to the vote of a 106 year old black woman from Atlanta to illustrate the whole of the American experience over the last hundred years. He did not blink as he included the miseries of slavery, the injustice of Jim Crow, or the inequities still facing minority peoples in this country.

Obama has been labeled a "master of rhetoric", but his true strength is the ability, when necessary, to talk directly and intimately to his audience about race. For too long, we have talked about race in this country at arms length, dehumanizing the very people whose interests we claim to care about.

Our new sheriff, it seems, believes that that Americans of all stripes are fully capable of being honest about their own feelings towards those who are different than them, and mature enough to handle the uncomfortable and surprising revelations that lie in wait as they go down this path.

There’s a new sheriff in town alright – a black man with a brain.

Afraid Of The Dark : Racial Animosity

The places I have run into the most resistance to my presence because of the color of my skin are mostly bars. Maybe it is the combination of alcohol and the concept of safety in numbers. Maybe it is the idea of a bar as a sort of sanctuary. Having a drink with people you know in a place that feels like home, even in today’s modern culture, isn’t much different than it was in the rum houses and the pubs that thrived back when the United States was founded.

I was in my own neighborhood bar a couple of years ago, a bar I had frequented enough to have a few friends and a rapport with the bartenders that found my favorite beer waiting on me by the time I sat down, when I ran into a guy on a mission. There was only one seat open, so I sat next to him. Because the bar was busy, I had to wait for my beer to be served. The next thing I knew, the guy sitting next to me turned in his seat, looked directly into my eyes, and said, "You know buddy, I think you’re looking for another bar."

He looked like all the other guys in for a few cold ones, guys whose company I’d grown to enjoy. So I said "what’s wrong with this one?"

He leaned in, as if I was a mouse in a cage in a science lab, his eyes piercing, a snide laugh escaping his lips. "I just figured – you know – a fellow like you might like this bar over in Roswell a little better."

I was kind of annoyed because my beer was taking so long, so I answered him before I realized what he was trying to say. "Dude, this is the closest bar to my house. Roswell is too far."

He snorted, his nostrils flaring, and took another tack. "I think you’ll enjoy the music they play over there better than the stuff they play here. You know, the music your kind of people like."

In half a second, he had taken all the prospective fun out of my Friday night. I was alternately livid and outraged, as well as angry at myself for getting too comfortable in a place where I stood out like a sore thumb. In another half a second, I’d made up my mind. "This sum-bitch is not running me out of this bar tonight" I said to myself as I glared back at him. Then a smile came over my face. I leaned in towards him. "Actually, I like the music in this place. Jeff is a pretty damn good musician. When he does Sinatra, he’s on the money."

Just then my beer showed up. The bartender was a woman who often waited on me. “Here you go, hun,” she said as she cleared away the bar area in front of the two of us.

The guy tried to bait me with a couple more heavy handed attempts to tell me I didn’t belong there. But I had my beer now, and since I planned on paying for it, and at least one more, I had as much of a right to my seat as he did to his.

Somewhere along the way he realized that I was a regular patron. His shtick calmed down considerably. By then, I had started grilling him about where he lived, and what he did for a living. By the end of the night, I’d found out that his ancestors had settled the area, building the first mill in these parts in the 1700 or 1800’s. In ninety minutes, we’d gone from adversaries to two men who at least had achieved a semblance of understanding the others position.

Do I do this all the time, as if I am Sidney Poitier, when someone is "afraid of the dark"? No. If I'm not in the mood to be bothered, I head out the door. But once I've made an investment, of time or money, I'm usually inclined to stick it out.

As infrequently as it happens, this kind of confrontation is going to happen again. We all know that this is a part of the deal you make when you move into largely white areas. Incendiary comments and racially insensitive innuendo are often directed at us in order to get us to engage in a tit for tat, a mano a mano shouting match that reinforces the self image of the aggressor. I guess I could prepare for something like this, could memorize a selection of vile retorts and phrases to couple with "motherfucker", forming my own cache of verbal grenades, but what really happens when you do that? And I’m too old to get locked up for knocking a man off a bar stool.

One of the things I’ve found in talking with people who are angry at black people is an almost religious conviction to reveal literally how they feel about us, as if it is their duty to present me with a laundry list of every bad thing every black person has ever been known to do. According to Entman and Rojecki, racial animus is consistent with "persistent pathological biases that include stereotyping, denial, political rejection, demonization and fearful, angry emotions" and "can include the extent to which white people see themselves as having group interests that conflict with those of blacks."

How does this happen, though? How does an otherwise sane person who lives in modern times get this way? One of my cigar buddies who grew up in Philadelphia opened up to me after awhile. One day, when we were watching a lackluster football game at his house, he wanted to talk. "I hated black people growing up. I just hated ‘em. My father worked for the transit authority. He had started as a bus driver and worked his way up to a supervisor. But he got stuck there. Every time he would come up for a promotion, he would come home mad, because somebody black had to be promoted first. He had that same job for a long time,” my friend said to me. “And we lived in the Italian section. My parents grew up there, my grandfather made shoes there, I went to school there, I went to church there – I didn’t know anybody black until after I graduated high school. What I did know was black people had kept my family from having a better life."

You will hear the words “affirmative” action come up a lot when you talk to someone like this. You may hear them assert that black Americans have been "given" their rights and fair share of opportunities, a semantic shuffle that sidesteps any acknowledgement that those same rights were in fact "denied" before being restored. In this world, black people are seen as being subjective, emotional, illogical, uneducated, and untruthful, while these white people see themselves as objective, reasonable, logical, educated, and truthful.

This group, though, closely mirrors a large contingent of us who are prone to do some of the same demonizing, the same stereotyping, the same denial and angry emotions. Even though these are largely defense mechanisms for us, we have to ask ourselves - how long we are going to continue to contribute to this impasse?

This friend of mine, who is a vice president at a multinational technology company based here in Atlanta, told me that day that even though he eventually came to terms with the idea of diversity, he still struggles from time to time with those old urges to stereotype people. He admitted that he was still prone to forming opinions based on information he’d gotten from listening to talk radio, even though he knew what the shock jocks were doing. I told him that I had some of the same struggles with old urges. We talked that day for a couple of hours, a sort of free-for-all where he asked dozens of probing questions about stereotypes he’d believed all his life, until we’d burned through a couple of cigars apiece debunking his misconceptions.

Do I do this kind of thing every week? Hell no. But there is one less white guy in the world who gets his information about black people exclusively from the media.

Talking about race in America is uncomfortable. It calls into question a person's own sense of morality. It forces people to examine closely all those inequities we have learned to rationalize instead of challenge. The Obama campaign strategists seemed to anticipate this right up front, devising as the backbone of their game plan what they call a "grass roots" organizing strategy. But what I see is really more of a hybrid of community organizing tenets and multi-level marketing techniques that has traded, from the beginning, on the power of personal relationships between individuals to build what is probably the largest peer-to-peer network we ever seen dedicated to a political pursuit.

The "Each One Teach One" feel the Obama campaign has is deliberate – it allows a message to penetrate into hard to reach, insular groups of people who are experts at holding their ground against new ideas, people like the guy at the bar or my cigar buddy. Because when you get right down to it, we all have enough things in common, even if they aren’t obvious at first glance, that can allow us to see the person in front of us for who they are, rather than who we think they are.

Why is this necessary? Why should I even waste my time writing about people like this, who are so outspoken about their bias against Barack Obama?

Because in many, many areas of the country, not just Wyoming and the Dakotas and Utah and Idaho, but states like Missouri and Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania, there will be many white people, according to the latest polls, who will be thinking about voting for a black candidate for the first time ever.

But these voters don’t live in a bubble, or in gated subdivisions that only admit “ambivalent voters leaning heavily towards Obama”. They live, work, eat and socialize with the people who are biased against blacks. Sometimes they are related to them. In any case, there will be constant jibes from this contingent between now and November, a constant flow of “he’s a muslim”, “he used to sell dope”, they think he’s the antichrist”, “he’s going to let black people take over everything” that will act like a river against the rocks in its bed, wearing away at those who have “lost their way”, hoping these new found Obama voters will come back from the dark side.

Claiming The Chinese

I returned a phone call to my buddy on the way home yesterday while I was in the car.

We chit chatted a bit. “Dude,” I said, “I thought you were at the office late because you were working. Is that a TV I hear?”

“I’m just watching the news. I’ve gotta wait on my IT guy to get finished. Oh – I know what it was I called you about. There was this Chinese guy on TV a little while ago, complaining about the price of gas. He said ‘it’s the Americans who are keeping the price so high, driving all those big cars and trucks all the time.”

“What sense does that make? There are more Chinese than there are Americans. China is about to become the biggest consumer market in the world.”

“That’s what I was getting to – this guy was at a gas station, standing beside his Mercedes S550, watching a guy fill his tank. And he says we’ve got big cars? He had on some expensive shades, some nice khakis – you know, like the guys in our neighborhood wear. The way he was standing, his body language and all, he could have been one of my damn neighbors.”

“Sounds like that Indian chick I had a class with in college. You know the one I’m talking about, she was kind of skinny, with a bob hairstyle. She always wore a Polo shirt with the collar turned up. Khaki shorts and K-Swiss sneakers with white socks. You never caught her in anything else. She wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

“There you go again. Every woman wasn’t trying to check you out-“

“No, no, she was too skinny for me. But we had at least one class together. I saw her every day. What I couldn’t figure out was how an Indian as brown as her could will herself to be white. I mean, she was dark. Came back from spring break looking like Vijay Singh. But the way she walked, the sorority she was in - she would hide behind those damn aviator shades and act like she fit right in with the white girls.”

“I know what you mean. This Chinese guy, looking at him – something was wrong with that picture, man. The world…the world is turning upside down.”

“Not really. Think about all the other people who came here as a minority and became white later. Look at the Irish.”

“Yeah. You’re right. The Italians did it too. My partner, he’s Italian. His father is almost as dark as me if he gets some sun. I guess they all got in here and hurried to marry somebody paler than them.”

I thought of the irony of our conversation – my buddy’s own West Indian heritage has produced features that are vaguely Indian, and his wife is most definitely paler than him. “The Asians are trying to do the same thing now.”

“What do you mean, trying? They’re already doing it,” my buddy said. “I mean, if I was in charge of being white, I’d claim the Chinese. The white man’s numbers are getting low, now that all the other imports want to revert back to their original tribes.”

“You sound like Dave Chappelle with that “Racial Draft” skit he did on his show. I think the South Africans have beat the U.S. to the punch - they've decided that the Chinese are black.” I had to laugh at myself as I shared this tidbit that I'd picked up from internet earlier, a racial mind bender I'd come across in the middle of my lunch break.

“I’m serious. You watch, the Chinese are going to be the newest addition to the white race. I mean, look at the numbers – it’ll keep them in the majority forever.”

“This election is going to have us looking at race in a whole new way in this country.” I laughed again as I hung up, but the uneasy sentiments behind our crude commentary showed that the concerns about the uncertainty of change were as real for blacks as they were for whites.

The press is already splitting Barack Obama in two - dissecting his background, questioning his allegiance he has to black Americans, spinning theories about what it means to be a black man with a white mother - basically, they are inventing psychological dilemmas for Obama he has already come to terms with long ago.

Whether America wants to deal with it or not, the illusory tenets of whiteness have shaped the policies and practices of our nation for just about all our existence. Even now, as the nation gingerly experiments with the idea of a large scale diversification of our viewpoints, it is discovering that a lot of the minority views are in opposition to the version of living the mainstream of America tends to follow.

This reluctance, even among those who consider themselves to be open-minded and fair, to accept Barack Obama’s candidacy as a fully legitimate outcome of “all men are created equal”, is in a lot of ways a signal of the unease many of our neighbors and coworkers and friends are feeling right now, an unease that is caused by the specter of self-examination. It is not black America, though, that will be under the microscope this fall – it is the limitations and failings of white America that will be called into question as the country examines what this candidacy really makes us see in ourselves.

No Puppet

After listening to the speech Barack Obama gave on Tuesday for the second time tonight, I feel the need to say something, even though, in the wake of the masterfully crafted speech that this presidential candidate ostensibly wrote himself, I am sure that whatever I write will come up far short of what he accomplished over the last few days.

To speak about race and America in the way that he did, with all that he has at stake, was simply beautiful. From the stark, even tempered delivery to the calming royal blue background to the massing of the American flags in the background, it all was calculated to add a large measure of gravitas to the words he spoke. His cadence was conversational rather than the halting declarative style we have come to associate with political speeches. His eyes were serious most of the time, a look that is not one the public is used to seeing grace his countenance.


The plain-spoken affirmations he made:

"I can no more disown him [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community."

"I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother"

"That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table."

"But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

"And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding."

"We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news."

direct, forthright, and without equivocation - this is no puppet, as so many black politicians have become, or some beige sensation who appropriates the exotic essence of the African American experience and ignores the rest, but a candidate who is firmly in charge of himself and his message.

The boldness of his rhetoric reminded me in many ways of a lot of the things I have written on this very board to you guys - but without the spotlight of a hundred TV feeds or the glare of a rabid press corps waiting to dissect my every word. As he proceeded to go on to describe white resentment to black anger, I felt that he was having the ultimate metaphorical conversation with the two halves of his own identity.

I don't know where this thing is going, but I am DELIGHTED to have such a capable and able representative of the darker slice of this American pie in the running to become the next president of these United States.

Race & Class - Here We Go Again

White America puts the characteristics of black people in an imaginary box they carry around with them. I know they do because I carry the same box. Despite all my efforts to discard it, it's there, right next to the ones I carry that hold the characteristics of Hispanic America, Asian America, Eastern European America, and India America.

But insert the phrase "middle class" in front of all these monikers and half the stuff in these imaginary boxes are irrelevant. Add "upper middle class" and you can put every supposed difference that's left into one box.

Juan Williams says essentially what I want to contribute on this, so I will pop his op-ed in below.

I have a client who came into the office on Thursday to drop off some documents for her loan. An Indian woman, her husband is the stateside CFO of a mid sized Indian corporation that does a lot of business in the US.

We talked for awhile about the loan while I made copies and filled in some blanks on the forms her husband had signed. A vestige of the tension remained from the negotiations over fees earlier in the week, which is pretty natural. So I put it out there just to get the issue of lingering distrust on the table.

"Are you comfortable with this loan the way we've got it set up?"

She replied that everything was satisfactory, but of course her job was to secure the best deal for her family. The way her eyes looked, the way the corners of her mouth were indented, it seemed even as she spoke to the contrary that something else might be wrong. Or she was dropping another package off at a competitor when she left my office, with the intentions of making it a horse race.

I gave her a copy of her appraisal report. We went through it. I made the appropriate gestures towards the decor of her home as we looked at the pictures, because flattery still works. I put all the copies she needed into a folder and presented it to her. While she tucked it away in her carryall, she mentioned that the house was pretty big "for three people".

So I asked about the child. It turns out her daughter is in high school, and wants to be a doctor. I ask where she's looking to go to college, and she mentions my alma mater. "They have one of the best medical schools," she says, the pride in her voice showing as if her daughter has already been accepted.

When I tell her that it has gotten a lot more expensive since I graduated, the look in her eyes changes - to what exactly I don't have the time to describe, but if you have any accomplished black friends they can tell you what I mean.

The next ten minutes she peppers me with questions about how to get her daughter in, about how to apply for various programs, as if I have a hotline to the admissions office.

I have to literally drag her out the door to get her to leave. When I tell her as she heads to her car that she is in good hands, she looks as if she actually believes me.

In this instance, class consciousness was more prominent than race, although most middle and upper class Indians feel they are a cut above African Americans.

Barack Obama and his wife are both lawyers, Harvardites no less, products of solidly middle class families who obviously valued education and a strong work ethic. But if I were to substitute the name "Scott Burks", you would probably assume from that sentence that this is a white family.

The New Negro is different. They are under 50. They have white friends that are higher on the friendship totem pole than a lot of their black friends. They have the means to enjoy the freedoms the sixties opened the doors to - because "you are now free to move about the country" doesn't mean anything if you can't buy a ticket.

But the main thing is, they are not angry ALL THE TIME. The images of Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters and John Lewis [US House of Representatives - GA] seem to bring in that gospel background music on queue, as if they are stuck in a time machine.

The sixties were almost FIFTY years ago. And so far, Barack is doing a fairly good job of leaving them there. It will be interesting to see how much of that comes out in South Carolina - because in politics, to say "MLK" is the quickest way to say "I won't forget you, brother".

But the pollsters need to get their shit together, because there is no more "black vote". Stand ten black folks in a line (or in my kitchen, which is I where I got the numbers I am about to give you) and you will get 4 for Clinton, 3 for Obama, 1 for Edwards, 1 for Jim Huckabee and 1 for McCain.

Even in South Carolina, my home state, people are learning to think for themselves a little.

We shall see.


The Juan Williams article is below, as promised:

BARACK OBAMA is running an astonishing campaign. Not only is he doing far better in the polls than any black presidential candidate in American history, but he has also raised more money than any of the candidates in either party except Hillary Clinton.

Most amazing, Mr. Obama has built his political base among white voters. He relies on unprecedented support among whites for a black candidate. Among black voters nationwide, he actually trails Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points, according to one recent poll.

At first glance, the black-white response to Mr. Obama appears to represent breathtaking progress toward the day when candidates and voters are able to get beyond race. But to say the least, it is very odd that black voters are split over Mr. Obama’s strong and realistic effort to reach where no black candidate has gone before. Their reaction looks less like post-racial political idealism than the latest in self-defeating black politics.

Mr. Obama’s success is creating anxiety, uncertainty and more than a little jealousy among older black politicians. Black political and community activists still rooted in the politics of the 1960s civil rights movement are suspicious about why so many white people find this black man so acceptable.

Much of this suspicion springs from Mr. Obama’s background. He was too young to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His mother is white and his father was a black Kenyan. Mr. Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, then went on to the Ivy League, attending Columbia for college and Harvard for law school. He did not work his way up the political ladder through black politics, and in fact he lost a race for a Chicago Congressional seat to Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther.

In an interview with National Public Radio earlier this year, Mr. Obama acknowledged being out of step with the way most black politicians approach white America. “In the history of African-American politics in this country there has always been some tension between speaking in universal terms and speaking in very race-specific terms about the plight of the African-American community,” he said. “By virtue of my background, you know, I am more likely to speak in universal terms.”

The alienation, anger and pessimism that mark speeches from major black American leaders are missing from Mr. Obama’s speeches. He talks about America as a “magical place” of diversity and immigration. He appeals to the King-like dream of getting past the racial divide to a place where the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners can pick the best president without regard to skin color.

Mr. Obama’s biography and rhetoric have led to mean-spirited questions about whether he is “black enough,” whether he is “acting like he’s white,” as a South Carolina newspaper reported Jesse Jackson said of him. But the more serious question being asked about Mr. Obama by skeptical black voters is this: Whose values and priorities will he represent if he wins the White House?

As he claims to proudly represent a historically oppressed minority, Mr. Obama has to answer the question. Too many black politicians have hidden behind their skin color to avoid it.

Fifty percent of black Americans say Mr. Obama shares their values, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. But that still leaves another half who dismiss him as having only “some” or “not much/not at all” in common with the values of black Americans.

There is a widening split over values inside black America. Sixty-one percent of black Americans, according to the Pew poll, believe that the values of middle-class and poor blacks are becoming “more different.” Inside black America, people with at least some college education are the most likely to see Mr. Obama as “sharing the black community’s values and interests a lot.” But only 41 percent of blacks with a high school education or less see Mr. Obama as part of the black community.

Overall, only 29 percent of people of all colors say Mr. Obama reflects black values. He is viewed as the epitome of what Senator Joe Biden artlessly called the “clean” and “articulate” part of black America — the rising number of black people who tell pollsters they find themselves in sync with most white Americans on values and priorities.

And in a nation where a third of the population is now made up of people of color, Mr. Obama is in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial politics. He is asking voters to move with him beyond race and beyond the civil rights movement to a politics of shared values. If black and white voters alike react to Mr. Obama’s values, then he will really have taken the nation into post-racial politics.

Whether he and America will get there is still an open question.