SexNation: The Nation gets a Sex Column

For years I've stopped reading The Nation. I simply found it, well, kind of predictable and boring, telling me things I already knew but not challenging my basic assumptions. But now The Nation is going to tart things up; it's getting a sex column, That's right SEX. You know, that nasty but fun stuff.

According to JoAnn Wypijewski, the columnist for "Carnal Knowledge,"

"It's sex, man! I think that's why they call it popular culture."

Now to some degree, what this confirms to me is an observation that the late Neil Postman made in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," namely serious discourse in American society is driven by entertainment values, and what this means, as I've noticed with some stories about Obama, that column will be interrogating the intersection of sex and politics, which surely mean it will be hot! Hot! HOT! now that a sexy black man and his bitch-goddess wife may occupy 1600 Penn. Avenue.

But what this may also mean that serious political discourse can't even survive in The Nation without a political analysis of the old in-out, in-out.

The left has made a cottage industry out analyzing pop culture, which I think has ruined the left's mind, especially the academic left with has produced all sorts of studies—black, gender, queer, post-modernism, deconstruction, etc. It has basically produced a theoriocracy that can analyze text but not explain the economy or any relevant sociological facts.

Generally, the left is interested in theory and pop culture while the right is interested in power and has organized over the last 30 years to obtain it.

So, let's see how interesting this going to be. If Wypijewski doesn't delve into the sex crowd wisdom of YouPorn, you know she's faking it.

[Disclosure: I've written one book reviews for The Nation and had a book published by its imprint, Nation Books.]

Man Crush: the Bitchification of Barack Obama

A recent article post on The Root, “The Obama Man Crush,” wondered why such men as diverse as: “Colin Powell, Michael Eric Dyson, Andrew Sullivan, Tom Joyner, Ted Kennedy, Bill Richardson, Christopher Hitchens and numerous others, appear to have such a "man crush" on Sen. Obama?”

According to the writer, Jewel Woods, a male gender analyst specializing in men’s issue and executive director of the Renaissance Male Project, the answer is “white-collar masculinity.”

Put another way, it’s his lack of bona fides “niggatude.” To break it down even more, he doesn’t act like a textbook nigga: on the dole, in jail, and the father of umpteen out of wedlock children.

And the man also speaks Standard English.

According to Jewel: “With degrees from Columbia and Harvard and a background teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Obama surely represents a break from ‘traditional’ images of masculinity. But it must be more than his educational bona fides.”

Because Obama can blend the aforementioned attributes and still play basketball, he is viewed as “smooth,” and “smooth” is a subset of cool, and “sexy.”

This is continuation of what I’ve called the “bitchification” of Obama, in which an intelligent, educated black man of mixed parentage has been interpreted as “female” in this campaign cycle.

It’s interesting to note the continuing “bitchification” of Obama. One of Salon’s political reporters months ago mentioned something of a similar nature: how Obama sounded more “feminine” because of his non-bellicose rhetoric, and how Clinton sounded more “masculine” because of her position on the war, and that reporter was merely writing about how an Iowan, a woman, was noting her perceptions of the two candidates. Well, that Salon reporter was roundly rebuked by Salon’s readers, accused of manufacturing Republican talking points.

Maureen Dowd had reduced him to “Obambi.” Friedman invoked “Tony Soprano, or Obama’s “inner Jimmy Carter.”

The point is Obama is considered a “bitch” or a “punk faggot” because he isn’t obsessed with bombing every other third world nation. Mind you, Obama mentioned dipping into Pakistan if actionable intelligence was obtained by the US on bin Laden, but he was then ridiculed as a rookie.

But now the McCain campaign has noticed this “man crush” but has sough to center it within the media. Salon.com has posted that campaign’s contempt for the Man from Illinois by running an ad called “Obama Love.”

The ad, with the Frankie Valli singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” has a series of video clips from the media’s chatterheads and some reporters gushing over Barack Obama. Of course, this totally ignores the fact that John McCain has also gotten good press and has considered the media his “base,” and Media Matters has noted how McCain’s foibles often go unchallenged.

But what this ad also shows is the utter contempt that McCain has for the pretty boy politician. What this ad also underscores is the “cult” of Obama, that his supporters are a crew of zombies who have attended too many love-ins.

Obama has once stated that he is aware of how people have a tendency to foist their projections onto him, but never has one politician meant so many different things to some many different people.

It’s the power of interpretation without being grounded in any of anchor reality.

The Dearth of the Cool

While at my local library I noticed the August 2008 edition of Ebony magazine, which featured an essay by William Jelani Cobbs and comments by others on “The Genius of Cool; the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.”

Who are the coolest Two-Five?

1. Barack Obama, politician
2. Don Cheadle, actor
3. Billy Dee Williams, actor
4. Sidney Poitier, actor
5. Quincy Jones, music producer
6. Lenny Kravitz, musician
7. Jimi Hendrix, musician
8. Richard Roundtree, actor
9. Denzel Washington, actor
10. Sammy Davis, Jr., entertainer
11. Bob Marley, musician
12. Ed Bradley, journalist
13. Tupac Shakur, rapper
14. Adam Clayton Powell, politician
15. Gordon Parks, photographer
16. Muhammad Ali, boxer
17. Miles Davis, musician
18. Walt Frazier, basketball player
19. Jay-Z (Shawn Carter), rapper
20. Samuel Jackson, actor
21. Malcolm X, nationalist leader
22. Snoop Dogg, rapper
23. Prince, musician
24. Michael Jordan, basketball player
25. Marvin Gaye, singer

Without a doubt each of these individuals do possess what essayist William Jelani Cobbs called the “key elements of coolness”: “self-possession, elegance and the ability fluent in body language…” One might add grace under pressure.

But if one looks at the list one notes that not one black thinker or activist, except perhaps Malcolm X or Adam Clayton Powell, is “cool”—not even Martin Luther King. The vast majority of the these cool brothers are in the entertainment/performance industry.

Black Cool is not of the mind and the intellect and how it is expressed in any cohesive, elegant form, except in the case of Barack Obama, whose cool confidence is often called arrogance. No, the coolness on this list is of the body, which reinforces that “black achievement” is physical, not of the mind and body working in unison.

A majority of those selected are actors and entertainers, men who are paid to exude “coolness” in an artificial arena or to appear as “black coolness.” Black thugs, pimps, and rappers are the essence of black body coolness in post-civil rights America.

Who are the truly cool dudes who exude grace under pressure as an “antidote to the heat of hateration”?

The Political Brain: Q&A with Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain"

The Role of Emotions in Voters’ Political Decisions

For the past three decades the Republican Party and the conservative movement have mastered the political game of controlling the narrative—the story and basic ideas of politics and governance—giving them competitive edge in dominating the national political scene. When you think of the GOP you automatically know its “brand.” Republicans seem to intuitively know how to construct and frame issues that go to the gut of the voter. Meanwhile the Democrats, placing policies before emotions, have lost elections and have had themselves framed as losers and weak on national security; in other words, they have led themselves to be branded by their opponents.

Contrary to what some Democratic politicos think, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, as well as a neuroscientist and political psychologist, argues in his book The Political Brain (Public Affairs, 2007), that emotions may well play a greater role in dictating how voters approach politicians and issues.

While Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? may have outlined how voters have been “duped” into voting against their own interests, Westen argues that this may well be possible because voters don’t feel that someone is looking out for the interests and values that give their lives meaning.

After several stops and starts in trying to conduct this interview, I spoke to him over the phone while he was in Washington, D.C.

Norman Kelley: Is it fair to say that your book, The Political Brain, makes an argument that humans are more structurally geared towards an emotional appeal first rather than an intellectual or rational one?

Drew Westen: In the broadest strokes yes. But although the real message of the book is that reason and emotion evolved together. We and other animals have been driven by emotional processes that we have had a lot longer, and that the quality that we like to extol and call reason. The best politicians understand that the strongest arguments you make are emotional arguments, which wedge information into a message that is emotionally evocative, compelling and draws people attention.

NK: Is it then fair to say that human beings are instinctually geared towards the gut reaction more so than a rational or intellectual reaction?

DW: We tend to have a gut level reaction first and a considered rational reaction only if that gut level reaction doesn’t solve the problem for us.

NK: So therefore that old saying “Trust your instincts…?”

DW: Yes. Most of the time our gut level reactions lead us in the right direction. If you think about how they evolved, when humans were evolving it wouldn’t be very helpful to stop, study the structure of the snake carefully and then decide whether or not to run from it, to catch a quick image of it and take off. Now, that’s not always the best way to make decisions, but if you think about how we make decisions. If you think about how we make the most important decisions in our lives, how to choose a spouse, by calculating the cost and benefit of a potential spouse’s attributes and then weighing them and comparing them to other potential spouse; we have a gut level judgment based on chemistry. Is this the kind of person I want to be married to? That’s how we really make our judgments in politics.

NK: Is the brain structured in such a way to [accept] an emotional [appeal] rather than a rational argument?

DW: Yes. I think it is fair to say that we tend to have rapid emotional responses before we have considered reasoned one, and that we also have value-based responses that are often quite well considered, but eventually become automatic so that we hear certain words, or images or metaphors, we know that this person is with us, that this person shares our values, and we respond to that immediately, to that emotionally.

This is where Republicans and conservatives have been much more successful than Democrats and progressives. They have branded a series of phrases, ideas, and narratives that are emotionally evocative, and that cues people right way that they are attentive to certain concerns.

I was listening, in 2006, to an exchange between a Democratic congressman and a Republican congresswoman on MSNBC about what Democrats and Republicans would do about taxes. And the Democrat was giving an answer—and he seemed like an affable guy—by signaling with his hands that something was going up and something was going down, I think subsidies. By the end of it I wasn’t sure what he said or exactly what he meant, but as a Democrat I wanted to think that I liked it.

The Republican then came on and said, “The difference between us is that they see this as a revenue stream. We see this as your paycheck.” And I remember thinking at the time that this wasn’t a fair fight. She [the Republican] wasn’t making this stuff up on the fly; she was well prepared not just with arguments, because it wasn’t an argument she was making, but what she was saying to people was, “ I understand that you work hard for your money, and I’m not going to take it away unless I got a really good reason for it.”

The Democrat wasn’t armed with some equally compelling on the other side. What the Democrat didn’t have was a crisp and emotionally compelling way to talk about the Democratic stand on taxes is. There was no mention…uh…Something as simple as…

NK: I can give you what the Republican was saying, “tax relief.”

DW: Right, they talk about tax relief…Saying that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes. What the Democrats haven’t had is the kind of language that puts, in an emotionally compelling way, that describes both themselves and their conservative opponents, something as simple as “Well, the question isn’t who is going to cut your taxes. It’s whose taxes are going to get cut?” The reality is that in the last several years somebody made off with about seventy billion [dollars] in tax cuts, but it’s not the average middle class family that’s gotten five hundred bucks back.

That’s the kind of response that has a lot of information in it. My argument isn’t that we shouldn’t use that kind of information, but we should sandwich it into an emotionally compelling form that lets people know right away what our values are, what our priorities are. That’s what the Republicans have done so successfully by saying something like, “They see it as a revenue stream; we see it as your paycheck.” It’s conveying that we understand that you work hard for your money.

NK: At one point in your book you write, “Of particular relevance to understanding the political brain is the idea that much of our behavior reflects the activation of emotion-laden networks of association, and that much of this activation occurs outside our awareness.”

DW: Most of what we respond to—most of the time—we have no awareness of whatsoever. Consciousness—as neuroscientists often describe it—is a very limited processing mechanism, meaning there is only so much information that can get into conscious awareness, and we are responding to cues from the environment all the time; whether someone is being trust worthy, what their social class is, whether they share our values. There’s a whole host of cues we pick up on unconsciously.

NK: We’re speaking of unstated cue?

DW: Absolutely. If you ask people how did they know that a person is working class, or that person held a whitecollar job, they can’t you the cues that told them and if they tried they usually get them wrong. The same often happens in focus groups. If you ask people about Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ads; if you ask people to watch that and then describe, tell you how they found it effective, how did it make them feel about Barack Obama. They will tell you exactly what voters told exit pollsters in Ohio where she ran the ad, which was they found it unfair. In fact, a majority of Ohio Democrats thought that Hillary Clinton ran an unfair campaign against Barack Obama. That same majority also voted for her. Although the ad was consciously received as over the top or unfair as or fear mongering, unconsciously it did register.

My colleague Joel Weinberger and I did a study for CNN where we used the new technology that allows you to measure the unconscious association to a message or to an ad; it allows you essentially to measure people’s gut level feeling to what they can’t report. And what we found from people who watched the “3 a.m.” ad was what had become most active in their brain by ad were the words we tested: “weak,” “inexperience,” “terrorist,” and “Muslim.”

So, even if people couldn’t tell you what that ad activated, you could pick them up with some subtle test that can be run on the Internet that essentially measure how long it does take people to recognize a word or ignore a word. You can measure in milliseconds their response and that tells how activate that word is in their minds or brains after they been exposed to it, particularly a message or ad.

NK: I’m struck about how so much of this sounds classically Freudian, the sense that Freud had talked about the unconscious mind and how the unconscious mind is driven by wishes, fears, values, and aggression.

DW: Your point about Freud is a good one. The first person to do political consulting in America and one of the very first ad men was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew—

NK: —Freud’s nephew! His nephew, from what I understand, is considered the godfather of PR, public relations.

DW: That’s exactly right. I’ve been meaning to read one of his books, actually, that’s been sitting on my shelf. He understood that much of the action of an ad is unconscious….

NK: Then you need to read Bernay’s book, Propaganda. Once I read your book I automatically linked it to what Bernay was saying in Propaganda. A lot of what you’d had been saying in your book I’d picked up from Bernay’s. I could see the connections.

DW: I’ve been a practicing clinical psychologist for twenty-five years and as a clinical psychologist what you’re most attuned to, what Freud really taught psychologists, psychiatrists to be attuned to is what network of associations are whirring around in the background of a person’s mind that they may not have any awareness. That is, a network of associations is simply a set of inter-connective thoughts, feelings, images and memories and emotions. In politics, if you understand what’s active when someone is angry about immigration, or if they say they believe in abortion in some circumstances but not others. Or, they want us out of Iraq but they’re concerned about a precipitous withdrawal. If you understand what’s whirring around in the background. It puts you in a much better position to be able to figure out how to speak about your position and values in a way that people can hear.

It does create an opportunities for manipulation, but I think the biggest danger is when one side understands how the minds work and the other side doesn’t. This has been the situation we’ve been in for much of the last thirty years where the Republicans understood that were are driven by our wishes, hopes, fears, aspirations, and Democrats are trying to convince [us] with rational arguments.

NK: You also stated that the Democratic establishment—especially its operatives—have “an irrational emotional commitment to rationality—one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain works and accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail.”

DW: Over the last year and a half I’ve given a number of presentations all over the country, both to bipartisan organizations and partisan ones and to party leaders, progressive donors, and I’ll some time be speaking in beautiful townhouses in New York City or in a beautiful home in Los Angeles, and somebody will invariably ask me: “What’s the matter with Kansas? How come these people are voting against their interests and voting for these Republicans who are giving big tax breaks to oil companies and for wealthy people? But giving them short shrift while losing their jobs and having theirs jobs shipped over seas and they can barely afford their mortgage and gas prices going up? What’s wrong with these people?”

My response was often, “Well, it’s the same thing that’s wrong with many of you, who are in the Republican tax bracket but are Democratic activists. Why is it that you care about things like poverty or the treatment of black people in this country when you are neither poor nor black? You care because you have values.” People vote on the basis of both their values and their interests.

In this election I think we’re going to see people vote much more on interests because they are getting frightened about the prospect of how they are going to pay their mortgage, fill their gas tanks, how they are going to send their kids to college. It’s those feelings that get people to vote, the feelings that are associated with values and opportunity, justice. Those are the values that drive people.

NK: While reading your book, I couldn’t help but equate some of your observations and ideas with advertising, marketing and branding. Is there a connection between the use of associative networks with advertising and branding?

DW: Yes. One of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans in
the last thirty years is that the Republicans have had a brand and the Democrats haven’t. When someone says “I’m running as a Republican,” you automatically know what they believe on a whole series of issues, unless they tell you otherwise. You assume that at least they espouse…

NK: May I offer what I think the Republican brand is?

DW: Yeah…

NK: National security, lower taxes, religion, a belief in God; strong family sense…

DW: You got low taxes, moral government, strong national security, family values, God and country, patriotism, Second Amendment, a whole series of things you know immediately are probably true and have been branded positively from their side. When some says they are a Democrat what comes to mind for most people is the brand that the conservative movement has attached to Democrats, which is they are the party of tax and spend; they are for big government; they are against the right to bear arms; they are for abortion on demand…

NK: They’re permissive…

DW: …They are weak on national security; they’re weak on crime, soft on terror…Look at how the two of us came up quickly with those negative associations [we threw] at the Democrats, and it’s because the conservative movement have spent thirty years and tens of billions of dollars doing the hard work of creating those phrases and creating the narratives of stories that go along with them, and having people repeat them enough times and with enough consistency that when average Americans hear the word “Democrat” and that’s what comes to their minds.

In that sense what we really have seen is a tremendously successful branding campaign by one side and virtually no branding campaign by the other. It’s almost as if you have Pepsi and Coke competing against each other; one is doing a terrific job at marketing its product and the other side is saying nothing while its competitor is saying the other tastes bad… In that sense we really are talking about branding…The same brain that buys cars and computers and laps also selects candidates and votes, and the processes aren’t identical because there are many more values involved in politics. But the process is more similar than many Democratic strategists have wanted to believe.

NK: What would you make of “Brand Obama?” And how the Democrats appealing to the political brain? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of Barack Obama is that he is a phenomenally charismatic speaker, who has taken the idea of unity rather division, change, a new kind of politics, and develop that into the beginning of a [brand]. Although in many ways it’s not what he says as much as it is the ways he says it that inspires people about Barack Obama. There’s been a constant charge about him being all inspirational and has no message, but if you go to his website he has well-thought out, well developed positions on almost every major issue more so than John McCain. But he doesn’t have a well-established brand as John McCain.

He does have the problem that the other side has been working really hard for 18 months as “different,” “other,” “dangerous,” “unknown,” and “by the way, did I notice that he’s black and not like us?” That’s the branding he has to be careful of and what his campaign should be thinking of in virtually every statement that he or they make is two questions. One is, How do I not reinforce the brand that Republicans have created around Democrats for years? Such as a tax and spend liberal; the idea that Democrats are weak on national security. And how does he counteract the brand that they have attached to him? That he is “different” and “unknown” and therefore scary, aimed at activating those unconscious networks about race.

If Obama succeeds in defining himself and defining McCain and making the election about wanting to continue eight more years of Bush/McCain Republican foreign and domestic policies, then I think he’ll win by a landslide. If on the other hand, the campaign becomes a referendum on whether you really trust and feel comfortable with, really know Barack Obama, then I think John McCain will win the election.


NK: What about “Brand McCain”? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of the McCain brand really is that story of his time in that POW camp, and is hard to question the courage of someone who went through that experience. And it has helped inoculate him from some of the branding problems that he could and should have at this point. He hasn’t shown in the last four years the same kind of courage of his conviction that he showed in 2000. I can tell you that the “Straight Talk Express” was his brand and it was a very successful one that appeal to people across the aisle—

NK: Yeah, I started to like him. I said, “Yeah, this is a Republican and he isn’t that bad…”

DW: I had exactly the same thought. But what has happened since then is that he has been on every side of every major issue. He opposed torture and now’s he for it. He was for comprehensive immigration reform, then he was against it, and now he seems for it again. He was against the Bush tax cuts because he thought they were irresponsible and now he’s for them. His brand is no longer working with Democrats and many independents. He also has the problem that every time he moves to the center, he makes it less likely that—particularly the Christian right—[the right] will come out to the polls and vote for him. And every time he moves right, he makes it less likely that the moderates will vote for him.

He has a real problem trying to find a brand for himself when Republicans seem to be unraveling. Ronald Reagan did a magnificent job of putting together fiscal conservatives who are often on a libertarian bent on social issues; their attitude is that they don’t want government intrusion in business and they don’t want it in their personal lives.

With Christian conservatism, which has been very much for government intrusion in people’s lives, having government can decide who can and can’t have abortion, or who can and can’t be married or have their relationships legally recognized, now that that brand is starting to crumble at the seams after eight years of George Bush being the brand manager, McCain not only has his brand of straight talker to figure out how to hold together, but also the Republican brand. It’s a pretty mighty task.

NK: Most of what you have written lends itself to political manipulation. If humans are more captive of unaware networks of associations, emotional one, how do we go about defending ourselves against manipulation? Exposing it? Is that even possible?

DW: There is an extent to which we are all vulnerable because the way in which are minds work. I guess you can say that we are all vulnerable to anyone trying to convince us to do anything, to being persuaded. When my wife says to me, “You know, I really like Indian food tonight.” Am I being manipulated or is she just telling me clearly what she wants? If she said it with less emotion, I might say, “I really want Italian,” but when she says it with that level of emotion, I know it means a lot to her. I say, “Sure, let’s have Indian.”

I think the really danger is when one side understands how to appeal to voters and the other side doesn’t. When one side understands that people are driven by their hopes and fears and that the other side thinks they are drawn by their facts and figures. That’s when you really have the danger of propaganda and manipulation that’s comparable to what you get in many respects to a one-party state, because only one side understands how to reach people.

What I’m hoping that happens in this election, and certainly what I’ve tried to do with this book and with my work, is try to arm the left so that the fight is a little more even. Progressives and Democrats can speak honestly and openly about their values and stop running from issues like abortion, immigration or guns or taxes or national security, and instead can talk in emotionally compelling ways about their values and their policies. To the extent that both sides are communicating effectively, that’s when you see democracy working well. Elections aren’t primarily debates about issues, they are debates about values and priorities.

Do you fundamentally believe, for example, that it really doesn’t matter that we should let the market determine which jobs should go where? Let the chips fall where they may fall and sure let someone lose their job in Michigan, but they ought to stop whining about someone getting a job in Tennessee or Beijing? Do you believe that or do you believe that it’s the job of leadership and government to ease people through times of transition, and to not let big business write their own rules so that we have a government that works for working Americans rather large multinational corporations? That’s a pretty big difference in basic values and how much empathy you have towards people have been displaced from their jobs, about whether or not you have lost your job.

Those are the questions which election are about and come down to. So, I’m less worried about manipulation if both sides understand how speak their lines in emotionally compelling ways. I worry much more about manipulation when one side knows how to do it well and one side doesn’t even know what the basic principles are.

The “Hot Mic” Syndrome

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.

The Return of Mr. HNIC

Jesse Jackson's "nuts" remark regarding Obama supposedly "talking down to black people" may well seal Jackson's fate as someone locked in the past and more concerned about his declining stardom in this presidential cycle.

Jackson represents the kind of HNIC politics that had become quite popular with some black leaders like himself, Al Sharpton and Farrakhan. These were self-appointed leaders who either ran presidential campaign that roused blacks and others, or brought them to numerous marches, but weren't serious about the one thing that politics is about: power.

Granted, Jackson's take on Obama talking down to black people could be read as a critique of the "personal responsibility" behavorist school that's been promoted by the conservatives for the last thirty years, and in which numerous promoters of such, Democrats and Republicans, have failed at, including Jackson.

But Jackson has talked down to blacks himself. When Bill Cosby was being roasted over "talkinhg down to blacks," Jackson said that he's had been saying that for years.

The essential problem with Jackson's remark is that established black leaders like himself never sought to deal with some of the social dysfunctions that characterized much of inner city life. For some odd reason they never devised a program, never mobilized the resources that blacks do have, to deal with institutional racism and the social dysfunction of black life that affects 25% of the black population.

This left a gaping hole for the right to expolit, and if you're an enterprising black conservative, you only have to follow the Shelby Steele and John McWhorter model, as noted by Houston Baker in his book about black intellectuals, "Betrayal." In other words, bash blacks for profit--which isn't Obama's motive.

Obama, to use Malcolm X' s apt phrase, is going to catch hell no matter what he says or does. Seen as not black enough by people like Jackson, he'll be suspect because he doesn't hewn to the black party line. He'll be under constant scrutiny by whites who'll suspect him because he is partially black and sat in Rev. Wright's pew for years, and has a funny name.

In the end, though, Jackson's remark may have done Obama a favor. In the eyes of some whites, if Jackson is talking about Obama like this, perhaps Obama can't be that bad?

The GOP’s Newest Colin Powell: Martin Luther King, Jr.

That the National Black Republican Association is running ads stating that Martin Luther King was a Republican, without a chad of evidence, must surely underscore their fear of being wiped out by an Obama tsunami of overwhelming black voters in this fall’s election. The NBRA’s argument for why King must have been a Republican is:

"It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks."

So, because “almost all black Americans were Republicans,” it stands to reason that King must have been one also.

If you read through the rest of this tortured syllogism, the author, Frances Rice, the association’s chair, never states that King had joined the GOP. It’s inferred. There is no evidence of King being a member of the GOP, and a number of the GOP and Jim Crow Democrats accused him of being a communist.

The NBRA's roster of the black GOP history states that King registered as a Republican in 1956, but it doesn't cite how it knows this. It assumes that just because Kings father was a member of the Republican that he was also. King could have been, but it sure would ne nice to know if there is evidence of a voter registration card.

This all came about because the NBRA is, once again, running bogus ads claiming such. Now, it wouldn’t be a major surprise if King’s father was a member of the GOP, but King wasn’t like his father and had taken a radically different course.

For example, King said this in David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross:

“The Negro must make it palpably clear that he is not inextricably bound to either political party….We will not blindly support any party that refuses to take a forthright stand on the question of civil rights.” (119)

“Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere…he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” (119)

And of Barry Goldwater, upon the Arizona senator winning the 1964 GOP nomination, King said the following:

Goldwater “articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist.” (340)

King went on to urge “all supporters to vote against the Republican nominee and other Republican candidates who did not disassociate themselves from him,” writes Garrow. (340)


Now, does this sound like a good member in standing of the Grand Old Party?