Last night I watched Zack Snyder's 2007 film version of Frank Miller's graphic novel, 300; an account of Sparta's King Leonidas and his brothers-in-arms defense of Sparta from Persia, led by Xerxes. (Persia, led by King Xerxes, attacked Greece, which was made up numerous city-states, and King Leonidas and his personal bodygaurds of 300 men and others held them off at a narrow pass called Thermopylae in 480 BC for two days before being slaughtered to the man.)
What struck me was the sense of militarism and the unabashed Greco flag waving and the rhetoric of "free men" and "freedom." It was a highly testosterone affair with slightly racial overtones.
For instance, ancient Persia, is the forerunner of moden day Iran (that's a problem right there). According to Wikipedia, Iran is a "cognate of the of Aryans, and means land of the Aryans." Now, Aryans have been mostly seen as "white people," aka "caucasians," but in the film Xerxes, the king of the Persian empire was "black," meaning he had bronze skin coloration. Put less graciously, the dude looked like a bona fide nigga with a serious bling-bling problem.
Now, I understand that this was a film based on a graphic novel, which means historical inaccuracy was a foregone conclusion. But one would think that the filmmaker would try to at least get the demographic right. Most, if not all of the Persians, looked to be "people of color."
Not only was Xerxes "black" but also a less than flaming faggot while Leonidas, was the epitome of Spartan masculinity. In the film, Leonidas disparaged his fellow Greeks in Athens as being merely "philosophers" and "boy lovers" to an emissary of Persia.
As a matter of act, when Leonidas wife puts in her two cents , the Persian emissary questions how is it that a Spartan woman can partakes in men-talk (affairs of the state)?
She replies that's due to the fact that Spartan women give birth to "real men." (Latter in the film she ably dispatches a Spartan politician who had abused and betrayed before the council of men.)
Where is this going? Well, read the last lines of John McCain's speech:
I’m going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach. Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all. Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.
Stating the obvious, McCain, as a former military man, is emblematic of the Spartan warrior ethos. Hence his stake in supporting the surge and using his past expericence as military man to become the commander in chief. McCain is known to be a hot head, which means to some degree he is a man of passion, however erratic.
Mr. Cool, Obama, is a lawyer, and constitutional one, embodies the Athenian ethos: deliberative, reasonable, and contemplative. One example of this is his response to aquestion at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church.
When asked about when does life begin, Obama replied "...That's above my pay grade." Cool. Rationale.
As as matter of fact, Washinton Post columnist Richard Cohen wonders if Obama is "Too Cool to Fight?:
Stephanopoulos vainly tried for some genuine reaction [from Obama]. In choosing Palin, did John McCain get someone who met the minimum test of being "capable of being president"? Everyone in America knows the answer to that. They know McCain picked someone so unqualified she has been hiding from the media because a question to her is like kryptonite to what's-his-name. But did Obama say anything like that? Here are his exact words: "Well, you know, I'll let you ask John McCain when he's on ABC." Boy, Palin will never get over that.
This has generally been Obama's response: calm, cool, and collected. However, it is that very sort of lack of obvious passion when not giving a speech that makes some people believe if he won't do battle in the campaign, how will he do battle if the wins the White House? This is the general view of most voters who watched as John Kerry allowed his record to be torn to shreds.
As Cohen notes:
What Obama does not understand is that he is being Swift-boated. The term does not apply to a mere smear. It is bolder, more outrageous than that. It means going straight at your opponent's strength and maligning it. This is what was done in 2004 to John Kerry, who had commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam. Kerry had won three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and emerged from the war a certified hero. It was that record that his opponents attacked, a tactic Kerry thought so ludicrous that he at first ignored it. The record shows that he lost the election.
As is stands now, the "maverick" label appeals to people who want a leader(s) to fight and buck the system. Or, the McCain/Palin ticket is now appealing to base conservatives who believe they now have a ticket worth believing in.
Perhaps, we should keep the faith that Team Obama knows the real deal; he's sticking to his game plan and organizing in key electoral states. Perhaps this is the "new kind of politics" that Obama is talking about: a kind of bloodless politics that is more cerebal than visceral.
Perhaps. But people want a "leader," a man or woman who will plant the standard of their hopes, dreams and principles in the earth and say: "This is what I stand for, and this is what I will die for."
Politics doesn't have to be bloody, but is should have some passion.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Course Correction: Now It is Personality, Not Experience
Although McCain was a navy aviator you can tell he knows how to maneuver the war-torn USS Straight-Talker. Remember when Obama came back from his successful European and Mid-East jaunt? He dazzled the world and gave a brilliant speech, which McCain took issue with at the American Legion. He said that Obama’s speech was confident about himself but not about America.
Senator McCain, speaking before the Legion audience, took Senator Obama to task for his Berlin speech for it displaying “confidence in oneself” and but not “confidence in one’s country” regarding the Cold War.
What was Mr. Obama’s near treasonous utterance in the eyes of Mr. McCain?
“…there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
For the Arizonian, “The Cold War ended not because the world stood ‘as one,’ but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership.”
Yes, and the instruments by which the U.S. expressed its “decisive leadership” were the Marshall Plan and NATO, which Mr. Obama mentioned the latter three times in his speech.
“Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security,” said Obama.
Then the presumptive GOP nominee took to task, once again, the presumptive Democratic nominee for mentioning the US “failure to lead” in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia.
If “…America somehow set a bad example that invited Russia to invade a small, peaceful, and democratic nation, then he should state it outright,” said Sen. McCain.
This critique by McCain is tied up with his general view he has of Obama: no experience. Hence, Obama’s greatest strength is that he is popular, meaning a mere celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. In other words, Obama is a frivolous waif.
But something changed…something really changed. The USS Straight-Talker did a mid-course correction after lobbing numerous video artillery charges at the USS Change, chasing it around as a celebrity cruise ship. The charge was no longer about experience, especially about McCain’s; it’s now about personality. In other words, the USS Straight-Talker deployed the USS Palin.
What must have shaken the commander of the USS Straight-Talker was the sight of Obama giving his acceptance speech before 80,000 fired-up Democrats. Perhaps the sight of the waif taking command and putting on a masterful albeit scripted nomination convention and unifying the party’s faction really gave officers of the USS Straight-Talker something to think about.
They needed a game-changer, and Gov. Sarah Palin appears to be that for the base. Without stating her obvious conservative creds, she is basically someone who’s attractive, vivacious and can give “good speech.” She’s a “hockey mom,” a regular American.
Palin, articulate, attractive, poised, hitting Obama with sarcastic remarks à la Ann Coulter, is the perfect, sleek missile cruiser.
Just as traditional family values and abstinence education no longer means anything to the party’s base since Gov. Palin’s 17-year old daughter is great with child, experience doesn’t matter now. A good example of that criterion’s irrelevance evidenced by the exchange between a CNN reporter was unable to get a straight answer from the McCain campaign regarding Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience.
This is about course correction. Now, the liberal media elite, McCain’s original “base” before the Christian conservative weighed in, is now the evil empire that dares to question an unknown politico for the office of the vice presidency. But by questioning the ship worthiness of the USS Palin, the media is essentially questioning the judgment of Commander John McCain.
It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is the will to win, not putting the country first.
Senator McCain, speaking before the Legion audience, took Senator Obama to task for his Berlin speech for it displaying “confidence in oneself” and but not “confidence in one’s country” regarding the Cold War.
What was Mr. Obama’s near treasonous utterance in the eyes of Mr. McCain?
“…there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
For the Arizonian, “The Cold War ended not because the world stood ‘as one,’ but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership.”
Yes, and the instruments by which the U.S. expressed its “decisive leadership” were the Marshall Plan and NATO, which Mr. Obama mentioned the latter three times in his speech.
“Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security,” said Obama.
Then the presumptive GOP nominee took to task, once again, the presumptive Democratic nominee for mentioning the US “failure to lead” in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia.
If “…America somehow set a bad example that invited Russia to invade a small, peaceful, and democratic nation, then he should state it outright,” said Sen. McCain.
This critique by McCain is tied up with his general view he has of Obama: no experience. Hence, Obama’s greatest strength is that he is popular, meaning a mere celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. In other words, Obama is a frivolous waif.
But something changed…something really changed. The USS Straight-Talker did a mid-course correction after lobbing numerous video artillery charges at the USS Change, chasing it around as a celebrity cruise ship. The charge was no longer about experience, especially about McCain’s; it’s now about personality. In other words, the USS Straight-Talker deployed the USS Palin.
What must have shaken the commander of the USS Straight-Talker was the sight of Obama giving his acceptance speech before 80,000 fired-up Democrats. Perhaps the sight of the waif taking command and putting on a masterful albeit scripted nomination convention and unifying the party’s faction really gave officers of the USS Straight-Talker something to think about.
They needed a game-changer, and Gov. Sarah Palin appears to be that for the base. Without stating her obvious conservative creds, she is basically someone who’s attractive, vivacious and can give “good speech.” She’s a “hockey mom,” a regular American.
Palin, articulate, attractive, poised, hitting Obama with sarcastic remarks à la Ann Coulter, is the perfect, sleek missile cruiser.
Just as traditional family values and abstinence education no longer means anything to the party’s base since Gov. Palin’s 17-year old daughter is great with child, experience doesn’t matter now. A good example of that criterion’s irrelevance evidenced by the exchange between a CNN reporter was unable to get a straight answer from the McCain campaign regarding Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience.
This is about course correction. Now, the liberal media elite, McCain’s original “base” before the Christian conservative weighed in, is now the evil empire that dares to question an unknown politico for the office of the vice presidency. But by questioning the ship worthiness of the USS Palin, the media is essentially questioning the judgment of Commander John McCain.
It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is the will to win, not putting the country first.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
The War at Home: Out of Sight and Out of Mind
Listening to the events of how Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and her colleagues were arrested in St. Paul during the GOP convention while credentialed, and looking at videos of Glenn Greenwald who spoke to St. Paul residents whose home was stormed-trooped clearly shows that America has whole heartedly accepted the “terror regime” at home that has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration.
Not only has the country accepted the more security is more freedom paradigm, but one virtually sees no and reads no reporting of it in the media. The prime motive of the police seems to be to intimidate the media from reporting on police actions and to prevent the press from reporting on the march in St. Paul before the Republican Party convention.
When the Chinese government, however, arrested six Americans in during Beijing the Olympics that was covered and editorialized. However, the police intimidation tactic in St. Paul is hardly a blip in the media, except for photo in the Washington Post GOP convention coverage section, they was virtually mentioning.
However, there was an article in the Post about a Chinese protestor whose mother was being harassed by Chinese officials because his family are pursuing financial claims against the government, and did so during the Beijing games.
But any corresponding reporting by the major organs of the established media on questionable police actions aimed at intimidating freedom of the press and the right of the people to peacefully assemble? Not much...
With warrant less spying, torture, Guantanamo, never ending encroachment on the Constitution, the land of the free and the home of the brave is becoming high-tech, consumer police state with the shell of a democratic republic.
Before turning to the local Pacifica affiliate station, NPR was cheerily babbling about how to watch the fall line-up of the television shows.
Which begs the questions, is NPR really a news-oriented station anymore or merely an audio brand of smugly packaged life-style shows?
Not only has the country accepted the more security is more freedom paradigm, but one virtually sees no and reads no reporting of it in the media. The prime motive of the police seems to be to intimidate the media from reporting on police actions and to prevent the press from reporting on the march in St. Paul before the Republican Party convention.
When the Chinese government, however, arrested six Americans in during Beijing the Olympics that was covered and editorialized. However, the police intimidation tactic in St. Paul is hardly a blip in the media, except for photo in the Washington Post GOP convention coverage section, they was virtually mentioning.
However, there was an article in the Post about a Chinese protestor whose mother was being harassed by Chinese officials because his family are pursuing financial claims against the government, and did so during the Beijing games.
But any corresponding reporting by the major organs of the established media on questionable police actions aimed at intimidating freedom of the press and the right of the people to peacefully assemble? Not much...
With warrant less spying, torture, Guantanamo, never ending encroachment on the Constitution, the land of the free and the home of the brave is becoming high-tech, consumer police state with the shell of a democratic republic.
Before turning to the local Pacifica affiliate station, NPR was cheerily babbling about how to watch the fall line-up of the television shows.
Which begs the questions, is NPR really a news-oriented station anymore or merely an audio brand of smugly packaged life-style shows?
Annals of Stupid Media: Obama's Gay Fathers
Add this to the list of stupid media. A reporter for ABC stated that Obama had a black father from Kenya and a white father from Kansas. There's nothing like keep the public duly informed.
MIA: Alaska's "First Dude"
Year ago Nation columnist Katha Politt made astute observation regarding social conservatives and Republican Party public policy. They decried feminism’s influence on the family, arguing that it caused women to leave their homes for work and neglected child rearing; however when lower-income women did so, stayed home, especially on AFDC, those women were decried as lazy and shiftless.
The current edition of the “mommy wars,” the “campaign edition,” underscores this same double-standard thinking that’s become a hallmark of conservative thinking. This all has to do with Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination as Sen. John McCain’s vice president, and the fact that she has five children.
Conservatives who have touted stay-at-home moms now revel in the fact that she is a working mother and one who has decided not to abort her recent child, a son with Downs Syndrome. Even more interesting is listening to and reading how conservatives find compassion for Palin’s 17-year old daughter, Bristol, who is five-months pregnant. For years conservatives have railed against out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy when it happened to lower-income families of colored.
And let’s be clear about this point. If this had happened to, say, Obama's 17 year-old daughter, this would have been been proof-positive that Obama was unfit for office. That if he couldn't control his own daughter, how could he be steward of the nation? When you read how Republicans spin this, it really truly underscores the GOP's sense of "traditional family values."
Those people are always having children out of wedlock. However, when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem." But now that it has happened to one of their own? Republicans collectively shrug their shoulders as if saying, “Shit happens.”
However, what makes this even more interesting is that upon reading the Times’ article by Jodi Kantor, “A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers .” One pivotal actor wasn’t even mentioned in the Palin family drama: Todd Palin, Alaska’s “First Dude,” the governor's husband. As a matter of fact when the Today Show did its sophomoric take on the “mommy wars,” Todd Palin was seen but wasn’t even mentioned as possible helpmate in child rearing.
The basic, generic assumption, once again, is that real men don't engage in child rearing. They are not seen as doing their 50 percent. In the Times article and the Today Show segment, fathers were missing in action. All the responsibility of child rearing is solely in the realm of women, who are no longer respected or exalted as MOTHERS but have been reduced to being mere "moms" or "mommies, " the latest metric of domestic consumption. "Five out of ten moms like Momex because..."
Once again, the obliviousness to society's double standard goes by the way side. When Obama gave a speech on fathers being missing in their children's lives on Father's Day, he was upbraided by some, especially Jesse Jackson, for talking down to black people, but other saw it as a message that applied to all fathers.
In his Democratic Party convention acceptance speech, he said this about fathers: Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents, that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.
However, when reading and listening to the tracts of the so-called mommy wars, Todd Palin seems to be missing in action while in plain and obvious sight.
The current edition of the “mommy wars,” the “campaign edition,” underscores this same double-standard thinking that’s become a hallmark of conservative thinking. This all has to do with Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination as Sen. John McCain’s vice president, and the fact that she has five children.
Conservatives who have touted stay-at-home moms now revel in the fact that she is a working mother and one who has decided not to abort her recent child, a son with Downs Syndrome. Even more interesting is listening to and reading how conservatives find compassion for Palin’s 17-year old daughter, Bristol, who is five-months pregnant. For years conservatives have railed against out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy when it happened to lower-income families of colored.
And let’s be clear about this point. If this had happened to, say, Obama's 17 year-old daughter, this would have been been proof-positive that Obama was unfit for office. That if he couldn't control his own daughter, how could he be steward of the nation? When you read how Republicans spin this, it really truly underscores the GOP's sense of "traditional family values."
Those people are always having children out of wedlock. However, when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem." But now that it has happened to one of their own? Republicans collectively shrug their shoulders as if saying, “Shit happens.”
However, what makes this even more interesting is that upon reading the Times’ article by Jodi Kantor, “A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers .” One pivotal actor wasn’t even mentioned in the Palin family drama: Todd Palin, Alaska’s “First Dude,” the governor's husband. As a matter of fact when the Today Show did its sophomoric take on the “mommy wars,” Todd Palin was seen but wasn’t even mentioned as possible helpmate in child rearing.
The basic, generic assumption, once again, is that real men don't engage in child rearing. They are not seen as doing their 50 percent. In the Times article and the Today Show segment, fathers were missing in action. All the responsibility of child rearing is solely in the realm of women, who are no longer respected or exalted as MOTHERS but have been reduced to being mere "moms" or "mommies, " the latest metric of domestic consumption. "Five out of ten moms like Momex because..."
Once again, the obliviousness to society's double standard goes by the way side. When Obama gave a speech on fathers being missing in their children's lives on Father's Day, he was upbraided by some, especially Jesse Jackson, for talking down to black people, but other saw it as a message that applied to all fathers.
In his Democratic Party convention acceptance speech, he said this about fathers: Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents, that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.
However, when reading and listening to the tracts of the so-called mommy wars, Todd Palin seems to be missing in action while in plain and obvious sight.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
"Betrayal": Houston Baker on Black Intellectuals
In the eyes of some, the public function of black intellectuals has changed from speaking truth to power to turning away from the kind of social justice activism that was the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University, has turned his critical eyes on this transformation in his book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008).
Baker looks across the spectrum of black intellectualism—left, right, and center. One of the founders of Black Studies, forty years ago, we talked about the role of black intellectuals, the good, bad and the ugly. We spoke days before Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s heralded speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Norman Kelley: Your book echoes Julian Benda’s “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (Les Trahison des Clercs). Benda argued that intellectuals of his era–the modern era–were increasingly responsible for inflaming the passions of nationalism, racism, and war. He wrote: “Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change had occurred: the “clerks” [his word for intellectuals] began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as it stimulators.”
If I understand you correctly, your book pivots off his central thesis but in a different direction. You see a betrayal in black intellectuals not fulfilling their public intellectual role.
Houston Baker: That’s right. I had a section in an earlier draft of the manuscript that addressed the treatment of the “clercs” directly, and I remember saying that at least a direct reversal, a mirror image. I remember saying that the situation would find the intellectual outside the grand salon, the dining table that uses them in a public way. While in the present economy black intellectuals are invited to the grand salon and are asked to sit down at the table, and discuss the next issue of neoconservative declaration of bad black behavior. It’s kind of astonishing from a perspective of intellectual history.
Kelley: Now, you cited Martin Luther King as the model of an engaged black public intellectual while most people would see him as a moralistic preacher rather than as a public intellectual, although he did write books.
Baker: Historically, one of the chief institutions of the black public sphere has been the church. I would use an example of an engaging analysis of the public sphere Du Bois’s essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “The Faith of the Fathers.” Du Bois’s claim—well, he doesn’t say it directly but it’s true—because black folks are excluded from politics, from the social policy of the country that suppose to be their native land, he kind of sees that they have had to develop a microcosm within the church and the development of spirituals. So, King’s legacy, heritage, geneology, through generations of black preachers is the start of his unconscious and conscious engagement; made to go to youth groups and prayer meetings during the week; being the preacher’s son.
That would be the beginning of the engagement, and then the other institution, which has fallen upon hard times in many instances but was glorious at the time that King was coming along, would be historically black colleges and universities; his Morehouse years in Atlanta; his father the preacher of the church. I would say his formative years found him in a black public sphere because of segregation through housing. The move into Montgomery, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would not have been, I think, at all disconcerting to King. This is all speculation, but it would have been seen as a destination church, a destination city, a destination region in the South.
What was unknown to him when he moved in Montgomery was the long history of building a counter public sphere, a black resistance movement, a black liberation impulse that was there and that was rolling through a middle age generation, and I use the middle age advisedly, of Rosa Parks. Bourgeois, wonderfully situated in Montgomery, and as they would say, “You are the chosen one. You are chosen to lead us: you got the look, you got the education, you got the eloquence to do it.”
And I think what was astonishing the kind of background, formative work in the public sphere, the kind of coming together of the public sphere, the ideology, the population, the demographics, the social interconnections of Montgomery; it was an almost natural, organic connection that took place between King and “the people,” although King considered himself one of the people. He was empathetic; he had compassion to go with it.
I have to say people have said this to me, and quite rightly, how can you use King as a model? Those are shoes no one can fill and we have moved temporally to a different plane completely unlike what was going on at the time when he assumed a leadership role. That is true, but as you have pointed out in your book the fact that Leo Strauss as quirky and dead has not stopped Harvey Mansfield from trying to be Strauss. The model is there. You are required to do your own kind of spatial-temporal adjustment. What is critical is that King was so engaged through his entire life that he realized that the stake was his life. “This is really dangerous work, my house has been bombed. I’ve been thrown into jail. I’ve been hit with bricks and so forth.” He’s engagement was full tilt. He lived his life in the midst of American violence, contrarianism. And as you have said, he wrote books.
Kelley: I’ve often mused to myself how things might have been different if he had taken some time off after 1965 or 1968, to think things through. He kept doing the same things he had been doing for the last thirteen years.
Baker: …Even had King delivered on bringing people into the purview of the community, with an effective strategy, it still would have been comprador, brokerage kind of politics. People also have to keep in mind the John Henry syndrome….King was clinically depressed; he was a sick, ill man. People said that he was muttering to himself; all the sexual activity going on; now he’s coming out with all these radical statements… I guess this is particularly true with men in general and specifically with black men. How many of us would admit that we are in therapy and medication?
Kelley: With King as that model—as an engaged black public intellectual-- what is the role of today’s black intelligentsia?
Baker: I think a person like Angela Davis is amazing. The fact that she is not on television all the time is understandable. The fact that she doesn’t get op-ed New York Times pieces is understandable. I think it was Z magazine some fifteen years ago, in an article by Ed Hermann, had counted up—and I’m going to be broad here—the neoconservative spokespersons’ op-ed as seventy, and then he looked over specifically at Cornel West and Manning Marable and they were, like, five [articles] in the same period of time. So we know we have a closed media, but never the less when Angela shows up it’s always SRO; it’s always a mixed audience of people. For example, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts in the prison-industrial complex. It’s scholars; it’s community organizers. I think she’s an example of somebody who has decided “This is what my life is going to be dedicated to.”
I think of Lani Guinier working out of Harvard Law School, and with her father working out of Harvard; it was a generational thing. He was the first director of Afro-American studies there. So, here’s Lani in combination with Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates situated at the pyramid of the academy saying, “I’m sorry, How are you guys counting the black population here? Shouldn’t we think whether or not that the people who you are calling black or Afro American here were slaves or whose grandfathers had been slaves?” Let’s break the statistics down. I’m sorry, but shouldn’t we be talking of insurance companies and their complicity in slavery and see if we can find a way to do a class action suit, which replicated what [President] Ruth Simmons of Brown [University] did. I think the eradication and identification of social amnesia, which America takes great pleasure in, is a function of the contemporary, productive, dedicated and committed black intelligentsia.
Kelley: There’s been a development over the last 40 years a black intellectual academic apparatus, mostly in the humanities, but there seems to be a lack of development of black intellectuals who can develop policy issues positions on poverty, education, declining infrastructure. That may no be a fair question…
Baker: That’s a very fair question…. Institutionally, I think, that the education that is given by Peer-One universities, and that includes in my mind, some beautiful state universities, the kind of education that’s given at the Ph. D. level is hermetically sealed off, for the most part, from what I warily called the real world. There truly are campuses, like the University of Chicago, that are walled off. You are petty much expected to use all those technological resources and to march lock-stepped to meet the requirements leading to the Ph. D. degree. If you wanted, say, to a write a paper on rurality, say English rural studies and Tennessee’s post-forming of agriculture planting era and you wanted to use two books but also use policy planting reports, I don’t think you could find anyone to advise you. There’s the cutoff in the education… You pretty much have to do that on your own
Kelley: But look at how people like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele came out the university and have plugged themselves into the neo-conservative policy apparatus, which positioned them. You don’t seem to be seeing that, by and large, from black intellectuals on the left, per se.
Baker: Dinesh D’Souza, my understanding is, was first connected to Irving Kristol. So, he did that at Dartmouth and then moved directly to the White House [as a White House Fellow] and then to the American Enterprise Institute. So we’re talking colossal financing. So, if some student came to me and said, “Houston, I want to do this something for the left. Could you get me $45,000 just to do an internship somewhere and not have any obligations. I would [laughs] have to say, “I’m sorry, man. I can’t even do that on my credit card.”
So, I think were taking here of the marriage between the corporation and something putatively called disinterested intellectualism. Then you look at Glenn Loury’s career. I’m in the academy. Nope, I’m out of [American Enterprise Institute] mainly because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism, as I understand it. So, we have to look at the corporate factor.
Kelley: You used an anachronism in your book, “race man” or “race woman.” You referred to Dr. King as being one.
Baker: The reason I used those terms, and I have to be honest about that, it seems to me that when I conceptualized this project 10 years ago, I’d been taken aback by the “Little Tree” essay in the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I began to get concerned about the impulse it seemed to me, to disappear race, the word, and as a variable in analyses in anything to do with the U.S.
Kelley: You mean counter posing that to the whole notion of being “colorblind”?
“We see no color because we are colorblind, but our policies coincidentally just happen to have a greater effect on people of color”?
Baker: Exactly. An unexpected consequence… I began to act like a pre-Raphaelite painter who said, “The more science becomes destructive toward the soul, the more angels shall I paint.” The more people kept saying, “This is old school, brother. We’re going to have to get rid of this race thing. Racial thinking. We have to think beyond race. I’m not sure if is a legitimate term.” In the special issue of Critical Inquiry, on “Race Writing and the Difference It Makes,” edited by Anthony Appiah, I think, and Gates, and I also believe Eric Lott, a white scholar at the University of Virginia, who’s in the current issue of PMLA. Why is race in inverted commas?...
Kelley: This is a reaction to the biological sciences that have begun to argue that there are no basic “racial” differences between blacks, whites, Asians, and others.
Baker: This is fantastic work. I’m engaged by it and enjoy it, but here, too, is the failure of the precision of that work to get out and affect public policy, and institutional and national amnesia. It’s what Langston Hughes said, and I quote him in the book, “I love Ralph Bunche/ But I can’t eat him for lunch.” Hughes again, “The average Negro hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance and if he had, it hadn’t cured pneumonia or lowered their rent or anything.”
That work is fantastic and I don’t want to sound like some stupid, anti-intellectual guy, but one understands, for me, in the forefront of what goes wrong for black people in this country and in the Americas begins with race. Marcus Rediker in The Slave Ship: A Human History—which is a hard book to read; he really goes through the chronicle, and such brutality is perpetuated in the trans-Atlantic slave [trade]—but he says the slave ship is the one institution that is often missed in accounts of slavery. There’s the slave plantation, of course. On the slave ship two things were produced; one was race and the other was labor. They are absolutely brought together in the New World taxonomy and structures of feelings, in politics, economics, and education.
I think, historically, that race has been the over determined area that has excluded and subjected and subordinated the black majority in the Americas and elsewhere. The scientific and empirical work [de-emphasizing race] is great, but on the sociological and day-to-day plane, it doesn’t really stop that store clerk from following you around.
Kelley: Well, let’s follow this up with, How have you seen race played out in this election?
Baker: When Thomas Clarence had his hearing, black people were debating one another in the proverbial places—the barbershop, the beauty salon—“Is he a good man? Is he a bad man? Did he do these things?” “Is she a sister speaking truth to power or is she being used by white feminists?” The debate was on; it was on. “We should support him. We shouldn’t support him.” If I get the percentage right, after he made that remark about “high-tech lynching,” seventy-five percent of black people said, “We got to support him.” If you read his book, My Grandfather’s Son, it’s an outrageous book. The NAACP supported this man. The notion was: he’s just shuckin’ and jivin’ and puttin’ on the mask. Once he gets on the Supreme Court, he’s going to recognize affirmative action for us.
So, I want to get on with Obamaphilia. I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government, that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex, a strict addressing to and budgetary allocation targeting the horrible education of black children. It ain’t gonna happen.
Kelley: Why do you think that’s not going to happen?
Baker: It’s not going to happening because, number one, the financing of the presidency; it not happening. The analysis of Norman Kelley regarding blacks and the Democratic Party is shrewd and on point: you’re locked in. You’re a voting component of the Democratic Party. Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda] and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist. I don’t think he has any interest in it.
Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has a piece. It starts “Let’s imagine you’re a progressive and you’re asked to support a candidate who…” and then he goes through the policies and votes of Obama. And he ends up saying, “This is kind of a trick; who do you think I’m talking about?” Then he winds up saying, [indicating the true reality that Obama isn’t as progressive or liberal as some people think]:
“Look, guys, it’s not going to happen.”
Baker looks across the spectrum of black intellectualism—left, right, and center. One of the founders of Black Studies, forty years ago, we talked about the role of black intellectuals, the good, bad and the ugly. We spoke days before Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s heralded speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Norman Kelley: Your book echoes Julian Benda’s “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (Les Trahison des Clercs). Benda argued that intellectuals of his era–the modern era–were increasingly responsible for inflaming the passions of nationalism, racism, and war. He wrote: “Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change had occurred: the “clerks” [his word for intellectuals] began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as it stimulators.”
If I understand you correctly, your book pivots off his central thesis but in a different direction. You see a betrayal in black intellectuals not fulfilling their public intellectual role.
Houston Baker: That’s right. I had a section in an earlier draft of the manuscript that addressed the treatment of the “clercs” directly, and I remember saying that at least a direct reversal, a mirror image. I remember saying that the situation would find the intellectual outside the grand salon, the dining table that uses them in a public way. While in the present economy black intellectuals are invited to the grand salon and are asked to sit down at the table, and discuss the next issue of neoconservative declaration of bad black behavior. It’s kind of astonishing from a perspective of intellectual history.
Kelley: Now, you cited Martin Luther King as the model of an engaged black public intellectual while most people would see him as a moralistic preacher rather than as a public intellectual, although he did write books.
Baker: Historically, one of the chief institutions of the black public sphere has been the church. I would use an example of an engaging analysis of the public sphere Du Bois’s essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “The Faith of the Fathers.” Du Bois’s claim—well, he doesn’t say it directly but it’s true—because black folks are excluded from politics, from the social policy of the country that suppose to be their native land, he kind of sees that they have had to develop a microcosm within the church and the development of spirituals. So, King’s legacy, heritage, geneology, through generations of black preachers is the start of his unconscious and conscious engagement; made to go to youth groups and prayer meetings during the week; being the preacher’s son.
That would be the beginning of the engagement, and then the other institution, which has fallen upon hard times in many instances but was glorious at the time that King was coming along, would be historically black colleges and universities; his Morehouse years in Atlanta; his father the preacher of the church. I would say his formative years found him in a black public sphere because of segregation through housing. The move into Montgomery, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would not have been, I think, at all disconcerting to King. This is all speculation, but it would have been seen as a destination church, a destination city, a destination region in the South.
What was unknown to him when he moved in Montgomery was the long history of building a counter public sphere, a black resistance movement, a black liberation impulse that was there and that was rolling through a middle age generation, and I use the middle age advisedly, of Rosa Parks. Bourgeois, wonderfully situated in Montgomery, and as they would say, “You are the chosen one. You are chosen to lead us: you got the look, you got the education, you got the eloquence to do it.”
And I think what was astonishing the kind of background, formative work in the public sphere, the kind of coming together of the public sphere, the ideology, the population, the demographics, the social interconnections of Montgomery; it was an almost natural, organic connection that took place between King and “the people,” although King considered himself one of the people. He was empathetic; he had compassion to go with it.
I have to say people have said this to me, and quite rightly, how can you use King as a model? Those are shoes no one can fill and we have moved temporally to a different plane completely unlike what was going on at the time when he assumed a leadership role. That is true, but as you have pointed out in your book the fact that Leo Strauss as quirky and dead has not stopped Harvey Mansfield from trying to be Strauss. The model is there. You are required to do your own kind of spatial-temporal adjustment. What is critical is that King was so engaged through his entire life that he realized that the stake was his life. “This is really dangerous work, my house has been bombed. I’ve been thrown into jail. I’ve been hit with bricks and so forth.” He’s engagement was full tilt. He lived his life in the midst of American violence, contrarianism. And as you have said, he wrote books.
Kelley: I’ve often mused to myself how things might have been different if he had taken some time off after 1965 or 1968, to think things through. He kept doing the same things he had been doing for the last thirteen years.
Baker: …Even had King delivered on bringing people into the purview of the community, with an effective strategy, it still would have been comprador, brokerage kind of politics. People also have to keep in mind the John Henry syndrome….King was clinically depressed; he was a sick, ill man. People said that he was muttering to himself; all the sexual activity going on; now he’s coming out with all these radical statements… I guess this is particularly true with men in general and specifically with black men. How many of us would admit that we are in therapy and medication?
Kelley: With King as that model—as an engaged black public intellectual-- what is the role of today’s black intelligentsia?
Baker: I think a person like Angela Davis is amazing. The fact that she is not on television all the time is understandable. The fact that she doesn’t get op-ed New York Times pieces is understandable. I think it was Z magazine some fifteen years ago, in an article by Ed Hermann, had counted up—and I’m going to be broad here—the neoconservative spokespersons’ op-ed as seventy, and then he looked over specifically at Cornel West and Manning Marable and they were, like, five [articles] in the same period of time. So we know we have a closed media, but never the less when Angela shows up it’s always SRO; it’s always a mixed audience of people. For example, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts in the prison-industrial complex. It’s scholars; it’s community organizers. I think she’s an example of somebody who has decided “This is what my life is going to be dedicated to.”
I think of Lani Guinier working out of Harvard Law School, and with her father working out of Harvard; it was a generational thing. He was the first director of Afro-American studies there. So, here’s Lani in combination with Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates situated at the pyramid of the academy saying, “I’m sorry, How are you guys counting the black population here? Shouldn’t we think whether or not that the people who you are calling black or Afro American here were slaves or whose grandfathers had been slaves?” Let’s break the statistics down. I’m sorry, but shouldn’t we be talking of insurance companies and their complicity in slavery and see if we can find a way to do a class action suit, which replicated what [President] Ruth Simmons of Brown [University] did. I think the eradication and identification of social amnesia, which America takes great pleasure in, is a function of the contemporary, productive, dedicated and committed black intelligentsia.
Kelley: There’s been a development over the last 40 years a black intellectual academic apparatus, mostly in the humanities, but there seems to be a lack of development of black intellectuals who can develop policy issues positions on poverty, education, declining infrastructure. That may no be a fair question…
Baker: That’s a very fair question…. Institutionally, I think, that the education that is given by Peer-One universities, and that includes in my mind, some beautiful state universities, the kind of education that’s given at the Ph. D. level is hermetically sealed off, for the most part, from what I warily called the real world. There truly are campuses, like the University of Chicago, that are walled off. You are petty much expected to use all those technological resources and to march lock-stepped to meet the requirements leading to the Ph. D. degree. If you wanted, say, to a write a paper on rurality, say English rural studies and Tennessee’s post-forming of agriculture planting era and you wanted to use two books but also use policy planting reports, I don’t think you could find anyone to advise you. There’s the cutoff in the education… You pretty much have to do that on your own
Kelley: But look at how people like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele came out the university and have plugged themselves into the neo-conservative policy apparatus, which positioned them. You don’t seem to be seeing that, by and large, from black intellectuals on the left, per se.
Baker: Dinesh D’Souza, my understanding is, was first connected to Irving Kristol. So, he did that at Dartmouth and then moved directly to the White House [as a White House Fellow] and then to the American Enterprise Institute. So we’re talking colossal financing. So, if some student came to me and said, “Houston, I want to do this something for the left. Could you get me $45,000 just to do an internship somewhere and not have any obligations. I would [laughs] have to say, “I’m sorry, man. I can’t even do that on my credit card.”
So, I think were taking here of the marriage between the corporation and something putatively called disinterested intellectualism. Then you look at Glenn Loury’s career. I’m in the academy. Nope, I’m out of [American Enterprise Institute] mainly because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism, as I understand it. So, we have to look at the corporate factor.
Kelley: You used an anachronism in your book, “race man” or “race woman.” You referred to Dr. King as being one.
Baker: The reason I used those terms, and I have to be honest about that, it seems to me that when I conceptualized this project 10 years ago, I’d been taken aback by the “Little Tree” essay in the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I began to get concerned about the impulse it seemed to me, to disappear race, the word, and as a variable in analyses in anything to do with the U.S.
Kelley: You mean counter posing that to the whole notion of being “colorblind”?
“We see no color because we are colorblind, but our policies coincidentally just happen to have a greater effect on people of color”?
Baker: Exactly. An unexpected consequence… I began to act like a pre-Raphaelite painter who said, “The more science becomes destructive toward the soul, the more angels shall I paint.” The more people kept saying, “This is old school, brother. We’re going to have to get rid of this race thing. Racial thinking. We have to think beyond race. I’m not sure if is a legitimate term.” In the special issue of Critical Inquiry, on “Race Writing and the Difference It Makes,” edited by Anthony Appiah, I think, and Gates, and I also believe Eric Lott, a white scholar at the University of Virginia, who’s in the current issue of PMLA. Why is race in inverted commas?...
Kelley: This is a reaction to the biological sciences that have begun to argue that there are no basic “racial” differences between blacks, whites, Asians, and others.
Baker: This is fantastic work. I’m engaged by it and enjoy it, but here, too, is the failure of the precision of that work to get out and affect public policy, and institutional and national amnesia. It’s what Langston Hughes said, and I quote him in the book, “I love Ralph Bunche/ But I can’t eat him for lunch.” Hughes again, “The average Negro hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance and if he had, it hadn’t cured pneumonia or lowered their rent or anything.”
That work is fantastic and I don’t want to sound like some stupid, anti-intellectual guy, but one understands, for me, in the forefront of what goes wrong for black people in this country and in the Americas begins with race. Marcus Rediker in The Slave Ship: A Human History—which is a hard book to read; he really goes through the chronicle, and such brutality is perpetuated in the trans-Atlantic slave [trade]—but he says the slave ship is the one institution that is often missed in accounts of slavery. There’s the slave plantation, of course. On the slave ship two things were produced; one was race and the other was labor. They are absolutely brought together in the New World taxonomy and structures of feelings, in politics, economics, and education.
I think, historically, that race has been the over determined area that has excluded and subjected and subordinated the black majority in the Americas and elsewhere. The scientific and empirical work [de-emphasizing race] is great, but on the sociological and day-to-day plane, it doesn’t really stop that store clerk from following you around.
Kelley: Well, let’s follow this up with, How have you seen race played out in this election?
Baker: When Thomas Clarence had his hearing, black people were debating one another in the proverbial places—the barbershop, the beauty salon—“Is he a good man? Is he a bad man? Did he do these things?” “Is she a sister speaking truth to power or is she being used by white feminists?” The debate was on; it was on. “We should support him. We shouldn’t support him.” If I get the percentage right, after he made that remark about “high-tech lynching,” seventy-five percent of black people said, “We got to support him.” If you read his book, My Grandfather’s Son, it’s an outrageous book. The NAACP supported this man. The notion was: he’s just shuckin’ and jivin’ and puttin’ on the mask. Once he gets on the Supreme Court, he’s going to recognize affirmative action for us.
So, I want to get on with Obamaphilia. I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government, that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex, a strict addressing to and budgetary allocation targeting the horrible education of black children. It ain’t gonna happen.
Kelley: Why do you think that’s not going to happen?
Baker: It’s not going to happening because, number one, the financing of the presidency; it not happening. The analysis of Norman Kelley regarding blacks and the Democratic Party is shrewd and on point: you’re locked in. You’re a voting component of the Democratic Party. Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda] and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist. I don’t think he has any interest in it.
Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has a piece. It starts “Let’s imagine you’re a progressive and you’re asked to support a candidate who…” and then he goes through the policies and votes of Obama. And he ends up saying, “This is kind of a trick; who do you think I’m talking about?” Then he winds up saying, [indicating the true reality that Obama isn’t as progressive or liberal as some people think]:
“Look, guys, it’s not going to happen.”
Less Is More? The Disappearance of a Black Agenda
While interviewed by radio WPFW (Pacifica Network) former Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, who chaired the famous black political conventions of the 1970s, mentioned that when Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) approached the Obama wing of the Democratic Party about including the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in the convention’s events, she was rebuffed.
Hatcher ruefully noted that at convention that had nominated its party’s first black candidate for the office of the presidency, there was no articulation of a black agenda.
As noted by public intellectuals, such as Adolph Reed and Houston Baker, Sen. Barack Obama has studiously avoided any association with a so-called black agenda, which would be nominally targeting money and resources to distressed black communities. Such an agenda would be the death knell to a politician who is trying to be post-racial.
“Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda],” said Baker, “and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist.”
By any estimation, Obama, while not the first choice of the political black establishment, had become the overwhelming choice of the black electorate in the primary, and is expected to get over 80 percent of the black vote in the general election.
For a number of black Americans, the excitement about electing the first black president may well overwhelm any concern about a so-called black agenda. The first job, in the eyes of many, may well be merely making sure that Obama gets the keys to the White House. When he gets in the brother is going to work it out.
But as Baker noted when Clarence Thomas became a Justice at the Supreme Court, “I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex.”
Obama may well feel free to go forward without considering a black agenda due to the simple reason that the CBC has been demonstrably weak in actually articulating an agenda blacks themselves could reasonably implement.
While CBS have various “freedom” agendas or progressive budgets that sought to alleviate the stress of black and working class communities, it is interesting to note that the late Adam Clayton Powell, while in the minority as a then-Negro congressional member, got more progressive legislation passed during the 1960s than the more than 40 members of the CBC has passed in the thirty-five years or so in its existence.
For example, Powell, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, passed landmark legislation that provided either legislative impetus or funds for federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, vocational training and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education. In a record that’s still unbroken, Powell had steered 50 bills through Congress.
Even more interesting, Powell, who was certainly more fair-skinned than Obama cultivated a sense of “blackness” and talked about “audacious” black power when those concepts were incendiary, yet he got the job done of being a legislator who could be said to have improved the life-chances of millions of Americans, black and white.
To be sure, the last 30 years of Republican dominance has been predicated on demonizing any advance of blacks as coming at the expense of whites, especially stressed lower class and middle class whites. Black intellectuals on the right, aided and abetted by well-funded think tanks, have help create the kind of talking points that pare down a “black” agenda to a list of grievances or just plain racial pleading.
However, the last 30 years or so have also meant that the national black political class, as represented by the Congressional Black Caucus, has sorely missed an opportunity to organize and utilize whatever resources that African Americans have. The black middle class makes up roughly 60 percent of the black population, but has pretty much receded as the leadership class. Instead, it has pretty much tied the fate of black Americans as a whole to that of the Democratic Party, which sees the black vote as a reliable bloc of votes that only occasionally causes discomfort to the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Increasingly, if there is no black agenda could it be that, at least according to a 2007 Pew survey (“Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class”), that blacks themselves, 61 percent, think the values of middle class and the poor have become more dissimilar? What would be a common black agenda?
Perhaps in Obama’s sotto voce of a black agenda, less truly is more.
But as John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm and one of Obama’s top bundlers said in the New York Times, “I think the good news is once Barack is elected, he is going to be a beacon of hope for all of us.”
Hatcher ruefully noted that at convention that had nominated its party’s first black candidate for the office of the presidency, there was no articulation of a black agenda.
As noted by public intellectuals, such as Adolph Reed and Houston Baker, Sen. Barack Obama has studiously avoided any association with a so-called black agenda, which would be nominally targeting money and resources to distressed black communities. Such an agenda would be the death knell to a politician who is trying to be post-racial.
“Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda],” said Baker, “and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist.”
By any estimation, Obama, while not the first choice of the political black establishment, had become the overwhelming choice of the black electorate in the primary, and is expected to get over 80 percent of the black vote in the general election.
For a number of black Americans, the excitement about electing the first black president may well overwhelm any concern about a so-called black agenda. The first job, in the eyes of many, may well be merely making sure that Obama gets the keys to the White House. When he gets in the brother is going to work it out.
But as Baker noted when Clarence Thomas became a Justice at the Supreme Court, “I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex.”
Obama may well feel free to go forward without considering a black agenda due to the simple reason that the CBC has been demonstrably weak in actually articulating an agenda blacks themselves could reasonably implement.
While CBS have various “freedom” agendas or progressive budgets that sought to alleviate the stress of black and working class communities, it is interesting to note that the late Adam Clayton Powell, while in the minority as a then-Negro congressional member, got more progressive legislation passed during the 1960s than the more than 40 members of the CBC has passed in the thirty-five years or so in its existence.
For example, Powell, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, passed landmark legislation that provided either legislative impetus or funds for federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, vocational training and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education. In a record that’s still unbroken, Powell had steered 50 bills through Congress.
Even more interesting, Powell, who was certainly more fair-skinned than Obama cultivated a sense of “blackness” and talked about “audacious” black power when those concepts were incendiary, yet he got the job done of being a legislator who could be said to have improved the life-chances of millions of Americans, black and white.
To be sure, the last 30 years of Republican dominance has been predicated on demonizing any advance of blacks as coming at the expense of whites, especially stressed lower class and middle class whites. Black intellectuals on the right, aided and abetted by well-funded think tanks, have help create the kind of talking points that pare down a “black” agenda to a list of grievances or just plain racial pleading.
However, the last 30 years or so have also meant that the national black political class, as represented by the Congressional Black Caucus, has sorely missed an opportunity to organize and utilize whatever resources that African Americans have. The black middle class makes up roughly 60 percent of the black population, but has pretty much receded as the leadership class. Instead, it has pretty much tied the fate of black Americans as a whole to that of the Democratic Party, which sees the black vote as a reliable bloc of votes that only occasionally causes discomfort to the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Increasingly, if there is no black agenda could it be that, at least according to a 2007 Pew survey (“Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class”), that blacks themselves, 61 percent, think the values of middle class and the poor have become more dissimilar? What would be a common black agenda?
Perhaps in Obama’s sotto voce of a black agenda, less truly is more.
But as John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm and one of Obama’s top bundlers said in the New York Times, “I think the good news is once Barack is elected, he is going to be a beacon of hope for all of us.”
McCain's Baby Mama Drama
I'm not going to attack or engage in classic schadenfreude regaring the news about Bristol Palin, the daughter of the GOP's veep nominee. However, I must note, for the record, that if this had happened to, say, Obama's 17 year-old daughter, this would have been been proof-positive that Obama was unfit for office. That if he couldn't control his own daughter, how could he be steward of the nation. When you read how Republicans spin this, it really truly underscores the GOP's sense of "traditional family values."
Those people are always having children out of wedlock, but when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem."
Intersting....
Those people are always having children out of wedlock, but when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem."
Intersting....
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