The reason Jesse Jackson wanted to radically alter Barack Obama’s outdoor plumbing fixture was due to Obama allegedly “talking down to black people.” Obama’s chief offense, it seems, on Father’s Day, was reminding blacks that too many fathers were absent in their children’s lives. Over the years Jackson himself has sounded this theme, and more controversially Bill Cosby.
In a Washington Post article, “Jackson Incident Revives Some Blacks’ Concern About Obama,” various members of the black intelligentsia voiced their concern.
Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University professor, said that he was quibbling with the use of his speeches. The Post article then quoted a Time magazine article in which Dyson compared Obama’s “routine” with that of comedian Chris Rock, meaning that Rock is “just as hard on whites as on blacks.”
Supposedly a professor of sociology, Dyson’s shtick has long been a string of glib pop book that tries to critique current problems but actually underscores how bereft he is of any noticeable intellectual depth. Notice his reference to Rock as a measure of comparison to Obama.
Ronald Walters, who worked on Jackson’s presidential campaigns and teaches at the University of Maryland, said: “We’re not electing him to be the preacher in chief.” For Walters, Obama needed to give more speeches as to how he would help the black community, not preach.
Walters, a political scientist, must surely know that old adage that a president’s greatest power is the power to persuade, and he sometimes must use that power from the “bully pulpit,” as Theodore Roosevelt argued.
A blogger for Jet and Ebony magazines, Eric Easter, said that Obama’s statement smacked of calculated political expediency to attract white voters.
There was no mentioning of the fact that Obama may have also been genuinely speaking from his heart: his father, a Kenyan economist who was educated in America, had been woefully missing from the presumptive Democratic nominee’s formative years, a situation he had outlined in his first book, Dreams From My Father.
But the response by Jackson and Obama’s other critics recalls another controversy regarding the black family, the so-called Moynihan Report. Written in 1965, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan while serving in the US Department of Labor, the report, officially called “The Negro Family: A Call for Action,” stated:
“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”
In the eyes of many during that period, the civil rights era, this smacked of blaming the victim. After all, it whites, via slavery and segregation, had altered the black family and placed it under tremendous stress. This assertion is the root of the behaviorist school of conservative social criticism, better known as “personal responsibility,” which argues that social programs will not ameliorate social conditions if individuals, or group of individuals, don’t comport themselves to the general social norms of society, and one general societal norm is not having children out of wedlock. In other words, illegitimate births, Moynihan indelicately placed that within “a tangle of pathology.” And one needs to be reminded that Moynihan was primarily discussing the lower class black family that was the source of this pathology.
In 1965, Moynihan cited black illegitimate at nearly 25 percent (23.6%). According to the Center for Disease Control 2006 figure that percentage stands at nearly 70 percent. [see CDC, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1; September 29, 2006, p12; see also Table 20, page 61.]
So in the 45 years since the Moynihan Report had been issued, black illegitimate births have risen to almost twice the original statistic cited. This may well have been what Sen. Obama was referring to; however, one is not supposed to state such in polite social company, and not before an open microphone.
Or put another way, in the last 45 years—the post civil rights era—established black leadership has never sought to mobilize the black lower-class for internal redevelopment aimed at ameliorating the kind of social conditions that lead to illegitimate births, a source of this pathology, along with lack of jobs, crime, and bad schooling.
Obama mentioning this social reality and wanting to use faith-based organizations (churches) strikes some as calculated posturing, and given that he has shifted recently on some issues, this view is understandable.
But Bill Cosby’s remarks at the NAACP’s 50th anniversary celebration of the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision also set off a firestorm. Either attacked for blaming the victim or applauded for saying things needed to be said, Cosby’s remarks merely exposed a fissure that has coursed through black America for years.
But did the comedian really say anything that different from what W.E.B. Du Bois said over a hundred years ago?
The great deficiency of the Negro, however, is his small knowledge of the art of social life— that last expression of human culture. His development in group life was abruptly broken off by the slave ship, directed into abnormal channels and dwarfed by the Black Codes, and suddenly wrenched anew by the Emancipation Proclamation. He finds himself, therefore, peculiarly weak in that nice adaptation of individual life to the life of the group which is the essence of civilization. This is shown in the grosser forms of sexual immorality, disease and crime, and also in the difficulty of race organization for common ends economic or in intellectual lines. (emphasis added)
Cosby’s greatest sin, however, as in Obama’s case, was making his remarks before an open microphone and before an audience that had reporters and TV cameras, i.e., being a celebrity who attracted media attention. Du Bois, on the other hand, had delivered his speech, “The Study of Negro Problems,” before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1897; it was published a year later.
There is a general tendency amongst some member of the black community that one is not supposed to state such things. They give aid and comfort to those who are hostile towards black advancement. The logic is, “If we keep quiet, things will work out all right.”
But what this mindset may really demonstrate is that for the last 45 years African American leadership has not been able to construct a dual-track program of action and policies that can argue and advocate for two things at the same time: progressive social policies from the government AND mobilize the black lower-class community to clean up its act. (And that lower-class black America has had to fend for itself may well explain the rise of the most troublesome but dynamic art form of the late 20th century, hip-hop.)
The unique and bodacious thing about Obama is that he has actually organized himself to contest for the obtainment of state power. This of course means a certain level calculation, posturing, symbolic, and actual political mobilization.
But given how African Americans have systematically demobilized themselves over the last 45 years—meaning solely putting their energies into mostly the Democratic Party and to a lesser extent the Republican Party, but without developing an independent political apparatus that rewards and punishes—will black Americans be ready to take advantage of the unique historical set of circumstances that could become available if Obama does actual win the White House?
Given how black civil society has atrophied over the last few years, it may well miss an opportunity to regenerate itself, and most people, according to Thomas Edison, miss an opportunity because it comes dressed up in overalls and looks like work.
In a Washington Post article, “Jackson Incident Revives Some Blacks’ Concern About Obama,” various members of the black intelligentsia voiced their concern.
Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University professor, said that he was quibbling with the use of his speeches. The Post article then quoted a Time magazine article in which Dyson compared Obama’s “routine” with that of comedian Chris Rock, meaning that Rock is “just as hard on whites as on blacks.”
Supposedly a professor of sociology, Dyson’s shtick has long been a string of glib pop book that tries to critique current problems but actually underscores how bereft he is of any noticeable intellectual depth. Notice his reference to Rock as a measure of comparison to Obama.
Ronald Walters, who worked on Jackson’s presidential campaigns and teaches at the University of Maryland, said: “We’re not electing him to be the preacher in chief.” For Walters, Obama needed to give more speeches as to how he would help the black community, not preach.
Walters, a political scientist, must surely know that old adage that a president’s greatest power is the power to persuade, and he sometimes must use that power from the “bully pulpit,” as Theodore Roosevelt argued.
A blogger for Jet and Ebony magazines, Eric Easter, said that Obama’s statement smacked of calculated political expediency to attract white voters.
There was no mentioning of the fact that Obama may have also been genuinely speaking from his heart: his father, a Kenyan economist who was educated in America, had been woefully missing from the presumptive Democratic nominee’s formative years, a situation he had outlined in his first book, Dreams From My Father.
But the response by Jackson and Obama’s other critics recalls another controversy regarding the black family, the so-called Moynihan Report. Written in 1965, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan while serving in the US Department of Labor, the report, officially called “The Negro Family: A Call for Action,” stated:
“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”
In the eyes of many during that period, the civil rights era, this smacked of blaming the victim. After all, it whites, via slavery and segregation, had altered the black family and placed it under tremendous stress. This assertion is the root of the behaviorist school of conservative social criticism, better known as “personal responsibility,” which argues that social programs will not ameliorate social conditions if individuals, or group of individuals, don’t comport themselves to the general social norms of society, and one general societal norm is not having children out of wedlock. In other words, illegitimate births, Moynihan indelicately placed that within “a tangle of pathology.” And one needs to be reminded that Moynihan was primarily discussing the lower class black family that was the source of this pathology.
In 1965, Moynihan cited black illegitimate at nearly 25 percent (23.6%). According to the Center for Disease Control 2006 figure that percentage stands at nearly 70 percent. [see CDC, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1; September 29, 2006, p12; see also Table 20, page 61.]
So in the 45 years since the Moynihan Report had been issued, black illegitimate births have risen to almost twice the original statistic cited. This may well have been what Sen. Obama was referring to; however, one is not supposed to state such in polite social company, and not before an open microphone.
Or put another way, in the last 45 years—the post civil rights era—established black leadership has never sought to mobilize the black lower-class for internal redevelopment aimed at ameliorating the kind of social conditions that lead to illegitimate births, a source of this pathology, along with lack of jobs, crime, and bad schooling.
Obama mentioning this social reality and wanting to use faith-based organizations (churches) strikes some as calculated posturing, and given that he has shifted recently on some issues, this view is understandable.
But Bill Cosby’s remarks at the NAACP’s 50th anniversary celebration of the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision also set off a firestorm. Either attacked for blaming the victim or applauded for saying things needed to be said, Cosby’s remarks merely exposed a fissure that has coursed through black America for years.
But did the comedian really say anything that different from what W.E.B. Du Bois said over a hundred years ago?
The great deficiency of the Negro, however, is his small knowledge of the art of social life— that last expression of human culture. His development in group life was abruptly broken off by the slave ship, directed into abnormal channels and dwarfed by the Black Codes, and suddenly wrenched anew by the Emancipation Proclamation. He finds himself, therefore, peculiarly weak in that nice adaptation of individual life to the life of the group which is the essence of civilization. This is shown in the grosser forms of sexual immorality, disease and crime, and also in the difficulty of race organization for common ends economic or in intellectual lines. (emphasis added)
Cosby’s greatest sin, however, as in Obama’s case, was making his remarks before an open microphone and before an audience that had reporters and TV cameras, i.e., being a celebrity who attracted media attention. Du Bois, on the other hand, had delivered his speech, “The Study of Negro Problems,” before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1897; it was published a year later.
There is a general tendency amongst some member of the black community that one is not supposed to state such things. They give aid and comfort to those who are hostile towards black advancement. The logic is, “If we keep quiet, things will work out all right.”
But what this mindset may really demonstrate is that for the last 45 years African American leadership has not been able to construct a dual-track program of action and policies that can argue and advocate for two things at the same time: progressive social policies from the government AND mobilize the black lower-class community to clean up its act. (And that lower-class black America has had to fend for itself may well explain the rise of the most troublesome but dynamic art form of the late 20th century, hip-hop.)
The unique and bodacious thing about Obama is that he has actually organized himself to contest for the obtainment of state power. This of course means a certain level calculation, posturing, symbolic, and actual political mobilization.
But given how African Americans have systematically demobilized themselves over the last 45 years—meaning solely putting their energies into mostly the Democratic Party and to a lesser extent the Republican Party, but without developing an independent political apparatus that rewards and punishes—will black Americans be ready to take advantage of the unique historical set of circumstances that could become available if Obama does actual win the White House?
Given how black civil society has atrophied over the last few years, it may well miss an opportunity to regenerate itself, and most people, according to Thomas Edison, miss an opportunity because it comes dressed up in overalls and looks like work.
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