The American Race

Obama's Not Black (again)

First, just get your yuk-yuk on with this bit from Comedy Central's new "Chocolate News"

Now for why I went there. From time to time—ok, pretty much daily—I just have to check the modest stats on this blog. Over the many months since I first began writing about Barack Obama and the presidential campaign, at least 10% of my hits have been from this Google search: Obama not black.

I think this comes up because there are a great many people who don't want Obama to be both black and president of the United States. Their number may well include Obama opponents and many disinterested (read : people in other countries who just don't get the contradictions of the American way of race) folks as well as die-hard Obama supporters.

The American Race turns up on these searches because of this post —"If Obama's Not Black..."—from way back in (gasp) January 2007!

I wrote in response to what I (correctly) called the opening round of artillery concering race and American identity in what was already the beginning of the political two years of our lifetimes. My take; forget about determining  whether he's really black.

If he's not "black", I wrote, so what? 

I Didn't Invent The Internet, But...

Listen to this piece by sportswriter Frank DeFord on NPR's Morning Edition this morning, including the snippet below:

Originally, in fact, blacks in sport were confined strictly to the arena. Many of the biggest stars — Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali — seemed downright threatening.

Endorsements invariably went to lesser white athletes, for advertisers simply assumed that a product's association with even a noncontroversial black player must be off-putting to white consumers.

But, my — as well we know — how that changed. By the 1990s, Michael Jordan was accepted as the most prominent pitchman on the planet, and he has been primarily succeeded by Tiger Woods.

From a cultural point of view, this sea change in attitude in sport signaled that race did not constitute that much of a difference in public figures — which, ultimately, of course, leads us to Barack Obama.

Then check this passage from my 2002 book, American Skin: Big Business, Pop Culture and The End Of White America:

...I date the emergence [of race transcendent black icon] to January 1979, when Coca-Cola first aired a commercial in which a towheaded white boy approaches former Pittsburgh Steeler defensive end Joe "Mean Joe" Greene...[the] fearsome black gridiron warrior is tired, soiled, and sore and is in no mood for fans. But, in a moment of advertising magic, "the Kid" offers up his bottle of Coke to the thirsty athlete, who downs it with gusto and a palpable sigh of release...
...This was before pro football players like Tony Dorsett, Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, and dozens more black stars came to epitomize the marketing image of the game, permanently taking a hefty slice of the limelight [previously reserved for] white quarterbacks in the process...
...It was one thing to legislate the integration of the races and quite another thing for a generation of white youths to begin openly idolizing the sweat off a black man's back and to have their idolatry validated and amplified by the power of a multinational marketer on national television...

I go on to call the wildly successful commercial "the first American Skin graft". And I posit that, as I wrote in 1999 or so, we had not yet begun to see the full impact of the revolution in commercial pop culture and American identity:

...Now, imagine the vision of the American dream though the eyes of Generation Y, who mostly weren't even born when "Hey, Kid" first aired. Their image of a "star athlete" is Michael Jordan (or any of a dozen black or Hispanic  athletes) as much or more than anyBut Gen-Y's multicolored vision is its collective consciousness as well as the national id. white athlete...Boomers can act out their American dreams in color today because, starting in the 1980's, commercial popular culture began catching up to America's trasracial collective unconscious.

And we all know on whose shoulders the end-Boomer dreamer is riding to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, right?

Wha'd I say?

Dreaming Anew About Obama

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world.

 —NYT columnist Roger Cohen, 12.15.07

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

—Andrew Sullivan, December cover story, The Atlantic

With two more MSM heavyweights weighing in on the "Obama is the future" tip (in very short order after this recent NYT magazine piece)  it's time to inaugurate a new sidebar update item.

I'm calling it Only Obama.

Sullivan's piece is especially interesting, and not just because he's a Republican conservative who initially supported the Iraq war. Sullivan goes further than anyone I've read in distilling generational healing from Obama's  not-boomerness. Only Obama carries no baggage from the  intraboomer culture war rooted in and symbolized by Vietnam, Sullivan says. But the maverick gay conservative also comes back to the plain matter of Obama's face.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy... The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

 

NB- I'm not necessarily an open Obama supporter. I honestly don't know who I'll vote for when the Democratic primary gets to New York. I don't even know if it will matter by then. But I am convinced that we have still not seen the full meaning of the Obama candidacy, whether he gets the nomination, or the presidency, or he does not.

So let's keep watching, and talking about it.

What About Our Daughters?—plenty!

I know I promised more about the battlin' Beans. But first, a big hat tip to Gina McCauley at WhatAboutOurDaughters.

Even as my own little girl hugs and asks, "Daddy, what's that web site about," WhatAboutOurDaughters has just gotten credit for knocking two advertisers from B.E.T.'s about to premiere "Hot Ghetto Mess" show.

I heard it on this segment from public radio's MarketPlace Morning report today.

Right now I just want to say I "told you so" that Gina would be an "impact player."
She started in April, right after the "iMuss" compelled her to "do something."
Check her discussion of why she's mounting a boycott here.

WhatAboutOurDaughters also gets props for really pushing the word on  the anti-gansta rap billboard campaign.

And though I know it actually plays into their hands, if you want to decide for yourself, hit the Ghetto Mess site here. Be warned, if your first reaction to the home page is to guffaw, you may have to humble yourself  in repentant introspection, as I did. As someone I know close to B.E.T. top management said: "If you grin, you're in."

More about "Hot Ghetto Mess" mess in an upcoming post.

Apologists Parade

Credit to the power of wishful thinking. And prayer, for those of us who believe.

As I predicted in faith last Thursday, the war for American cultural renewal is looking to open up a front against the main force degrading people of color in general and black women in particular: the rap/hip-hop media marketing and entertainment industry. So says the AP: "With Imus Gone, Critics Turning to Rap". Some quotes:

"We all know where the real battleground is," wrote Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock. "We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show."

Cultural critic, author and columnist Stanley Crouch, a longtime foe of rap music, suspected the Imus ordeal would galvanize young black women across the country. He said a key moment was when the Rutgers players appeared at a news conference this week - poised, dignified and defying stereotypes seen in rap videos and "dumb" comedies.
"When the public got to see these women, what they were, it was kind of shocking," Crouch said. "It made accepting the denigration not quite as comfortable as it had been for far too long."

Let it be noted without comment that the Rev. Al Sharpton also said he was committed to the battle that, frankly, cynical conventional wisdom holds to be an already lost cause.

We'll see...but for now I want to start a watch on the Apologists Parade. That's all those people, starting with the usual self-interested suspects, that convene (connive?) conventional wisdom on this issue. Snoop Dogg was first up; his asinine rant was actually a godsend, a perfect pretext to put gangsta rap culture into our sights.

Am I Black Enuf For Ya Now?

The Washington Post reports what anyone with a passing understanding of black folks could have told you months ago: African-Americans are going with Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Even Debra Dickerson predicted as much, saying "The black embrace is Obama's to lose," before going on to rashly trash him for not being black at all. All the Post story reflects is the pollsters catching up to the tidal movements of black opinion which, in fairness, can be kind of glacial.

Bottom line: The "Is Obama black enough?" for black voters game just went into its last quarter with the Illinois senator holding a solid 10 point (44% to 33%) lead. I'm gonna go out on a limb and call this one, and channel surf over to the next hot reality series. It's something like "Survivor" crossed with "America's Next Top Negro."

Wha'd I Say: Fame & Money Talks, Kobe Walks

Not That I Told You So, But.....

On July 27 (see "The O.J. Resurrection" below) I wrote:

"Mark my words, barring the improbable guilty verdict, Kobe, unlike O.J., will come ALL the way back, and it won't take a decade. Why? Because O.J. already died, briefly, for his sins. If I was Kobe's almost white wife, I wouldn’t push my luck."

On August 27th, under the headline- In Kobe Bryant Case, Issues of Power, Not of Race- the New York Times wrote:

“Some scholars and social critics say ...society has traded one set of preoccupations for another. Race, as an issue of trial strategy and social debate, has been supplanted in the Bryant case, they say, by questions of celebrity and class; what really separates the defendant and accuser is not color but power.”
“Celebrity status trumps race,” said professor Lawrence M Friedman, who teaches the history of law at Stanford University Law School.

Yesterday the prosecutors of Eagle County Colorado gave up the ghost of a chance that NBA superstar Kobe Bryant would be found guilty of raping a then 19-year-old employee of a Vail resort hotel.

Correlation is not causation, but it ain't no coincidence, either. Wha'd I say?