Dangerous Vagrancy

a wet glimpse

2008-02-23T09:47:00.000-08:00

a wet
glimpse a wet
wick a wet
tip of phosphorous imagined
signs
(a flexed toe
a lingering inscrutable gaze
an elbow nervously scratched)
rubbing sparkless against my mind
numb friction dumb
fecundity
the stink of stifled heat
nothing like the slow drag
of thigh over warm thigh
the loose dangle of a foot
the ankle spasming in concert
to the pulse of the crossed
and enfolded universe

the scene (fragment)

2008-02-17T12:44:00.000-08:00

puff puff afro fluff
fidel baby tee lips designer belt when
dance moves become angular
her navel cleft winking at him
he imagines
as he two steps the beat
side steps strangers with feats of agility
while maintaining his focus

she looks at him
or at the bar perhaps he cannot tell
but makes a note to get off the shelf
where heightened aspirations
are always only a matter of weakened dollars
where labels are still everything
and your name is less important than your taste

tongue tank-treading in his mouth
his throat is dry
and this becomes the newest reason why he
delays
orders a bottle of water
regrets paying for what should be free
indignant at the world the club
is no place
for politics

This is my favorite video ever

2008-02-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

I got a Valentine's Date with Jean-Luc Picard!

2008-02-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Whoo! All part of my quest to re-narrate Valentine's Day as tragic rather than romantic.

MACBETH

* BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
* CHICHESTER FESTIVAL THEATRE
* DIRECTED BY RUPERT GOOLD

Feb 12*—Mar 22
Tue—Fri at 7:30pm
Sat at 2pm & 7:30pm
Sun at 3pm
*Macbeth: The Benefit, to support BAM. Performance starts at 8pm.

BAM Harvey Theater
Running Time: 180min with intermission
Sold out!

Patrick Stewart boldly reasserts his reputation as one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time in a commanding performance as Macbeth. Fresh from their landmark UK production of The Tempest, Stewart reunites with rising star director Rupert Goold in the harrowing study of the seductive nature of power that was the sold-out, must-see event of the summer in its Chichester Festival Theatre debut. Set in an industrial chamber that is equally military hospital ward, kitchen, torture chamber, and abattoir, Goold's eerily modern Macbeth rings with the echoes of Stalinist terror. Macbeth is a decorated and loyal war hero, but loyalty only goes so far when greatness and history beckon and murder is only a matter of military coups and secret assassinations. Stewart's genius is to reveal Macbeth as a moral man turned ruthless paranoid, one who understands exactly what he's gaining—and what he's losing—as he coldly disposes of the friends and family who stand in the way of his irrepressible ambition.

If I was President...

2008-02-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

Wow

2008-02-01T14:20:00.000-08:00

addiction (a freestyle)

2008-02-01T10:56:00.000-08:00

serial dissatisfaction
the maul and murder of peace
of mind
attila marching
through the walls of gaul
ransacking the the romantic puff
of the self

:)

2008-01-24T13:26:00.001-08:00

In case it is actually banned by BET:

2008-01-24T10:28:00.001-08:00

Wow, just .... wow

2008-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

Trouble the Water

2008-01-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

I'm posting mostly to remind myself to keep an eye out for this film, screening at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival:

Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Sundance doc competition film "Trouble the Water" humanizes a voiceless population silenced after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In the film, the filmmakers (who worked with Michael Moore on "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11") team up with native New Orleans filmmaker and musician Kimberly Rivers and her husband to create an account of the effects of Katrina has had on the city's population. "'Trouble the Water' makes unapologetically clear that Hurricane Katrina rages on as an unnatural disaster of governmental and journalistic failure," writes Sundance's Shari Frilot of the film in the '08 Sundance catalog. "What is also truly amazing is that the levee protecting Kimberly's humanity against this devastating storm remains firmly grounded in her deep-rooted love for New Orleans, her family, and her art, and her enduring faith in her fellow human beings."

Here is an excerpt of an interview with the film-makers:

What prompted the idea for "Trouble the Water" and how did it evolve?

Like the rest of the country, we were stunned and outraged by the images we saw on television in the aftermath of Katrina. We wanted to know why the city had not been evacuated before the storm, and why help was so late in coming after the levees collapsed. What originally brought us to central Louisiana was our interest in documenting the return of National Guard soldiers from Baghdad to nearby Fort Polk. We wondered what they would encounter, going from one war zone to another in their hometown. But the story started to bog down when the National Guard public affairs team closed off access to the troops. "Fahrenheit 9/11" screwed it up for all you guys," said the media "liaison", little suspecting she was addressing two of that film's producers. We were ready to shut down the cameras, send the crews home, and just begin volunteering at the shelter. That was when, a week into the shoot, two gifted storytellers who had evacuated New Orleans a week earlier, homed in on us. And we ended up telling a slightly different story.

Can you elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film?
Our approach is pretty straightforward -- trust our instincts and each other, listen carefully, and be impacted by what happens around us. Life takes place outside the narrow lens of the camera, so we try to respond to what is going on in the moment, not just what's in our heads or written in a treatment. That's how that chance meeting with Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts redirected us and the story we decided to tell.
We chose to open our film with that first encounter to bring the audience into the story the way we were brought in ourselves. Along the journey, we felt surprise and outrage, and were moved to tears and laughter. We knew that unless we screwed it up in the edit room, the audience would also feel the same emotions. You can't expect the audience will feel something that you don't yourself feel when the cameras are rolling. You can't manufacture that. It needs to be real.

Thoughts on the SC Debate

2008-01-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

Whew! Well, parts of that first hour were Jerry Springer-esque, weren't they? I definitely had mixed feelings: part of me was, I'm sad to admit, exhilarated, by the fact the Clinton machine was finally, and directly, called out for its ridiculous tactics so far (blatant misrepresentations, Bill Clinton in attack dog mode, etc.). It was also interested to see pressure applied to Obama on particular issues. His message of hope has and will continue to have resonance, but he needs to be better about addressing the (soy) meat and (curried) potato issues that people are really concerned about. And on that point, I was definitely disappointed.

This debate was sponsored by the CBC and promised debate on tough topics that affect the African-American community, but instead the candidates were asked questions like "Was Bill Clinton the first black president?" and "Why would MLK endorse you?" As my brother said, you might as well ask, "Why would Optimus Prime vote for you? Answer in one minute or less." Dumb. Issues like Jena (which Obama made quick reference to in his speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Sunday) were not asked about or talked about at all. The candidates were quick to blame the CNN format for setting the agenda of the dialogue, but they should have been as quick to bring up more substantive issues as they were to bicker or jump into stump speech mode. I'm tired of hearing about 35 years. I'm tired of hearing about hope and change in vague terms. And even though Edwards, again the most progressive of the three, kept above the Obama-Clinton fray, I'm tired about hearing about the mills. And, yes, I'm still mad that they kept Kucinich out of the previous debate. For commentary see this and this.

Man, he bodied Ebenezer (Obama part 999 and a third)

2008-01-21T12:34:00.001-08:00

Check out this article, "Obama Reaches the Mountaintop," from, yes, The Nation. This is the meat of it:

...in his Sunday speech at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Barack Obama went to a higher ground -- to that mountaintop that King occupied until his death on April 4, 1968, and that Bobby Kennedy stood for a brief and remarkable political moment that played out between April and June of that fateful year.

"Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country," Obama told a audience that hung on the every word of the most emotionally-effective orator to seek the presidency since Kennedy.

"I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans," explained Obama. "I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."

Obama used this notion of a deeper and more fundamentally-damaging deficit to frame the message of a campaign that is only now beginning to distinguish itself not just from the failures of the Bush era, with its immoral embrace of the economics of inequality and imbalance, but of the Clinton era, with its adherence to a technocratic economic vision that while sounder than Bushism still treated moral concerns as footnotes to a broader project.

Of course, it is appropriate to balance budgets. But there is nothing appropriate or moral about balancing what are at their root statements about our values -- for what else can a budget that by its very nature picks winners and losers be? -- on the backs of the poor.

"We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education," said Obama, who continued:

"We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.

"We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

"We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

"And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.

"So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour."

It will take more than just interest-rate shifts or macro-economic strategies to close the "empathy deficit."

And, to his immense credit, Obama recognizes this.

"Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we've come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap," the senator says. "We've come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily -- that it's just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved. All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price. But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes - a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts."

The call for "a broadening of hearts" is more than just rhetoric. It is a practical necessity. Obama can win the Democratic nomination and the presidency only if voters make a great leap. It is not a strategic leap. It is an emotional leap -- motivated by faith and hope rather than compromise or cold calculation. To inspire it, Obama must avoid the pits and valleys of those squabbles into which the Clintons seek to draw him. That is the petty politics of the past, the politics that cost him a win in Nevada and could well cost him the nomination.

Instead of arguing about who closed which casino door in Las Vegas or who said what on a radio ad, Obama should be shouting from the mountaintops about this "empathy deficit" and about our ability to leap across it if we make the right choices.

This is the speech Obama has needed to deliver.

This is the speech America has been waiting for since that awful and glorious spring of 1968.

Barack Obama has found the language for a politics that transforms rather than merely transitions. He should not retreat from the mountaintop. He should hold the rhetorical ground he has finally captured, and call us to join him upon it.

Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"

2008-01-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"
By Adam Howard, AlterNet
Posted on January 21, 2008, Printed on January 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74337/

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -- Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963

The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliché. It's played every Martin Luther King Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.

I have vivid memories from my childhood of watching the famous speech in class and hearing an obnoxious white classmate of mine mock King's dramatic tones and rhetoric while other white students chuckled uncomfortably. Aside from wanting to strangle this kid, in part because I was so fascinated with King, I also felt far removed from the black and white images on the screen and from the dire times during which he and his supporters lived. Even his name -- the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., intimidated me. It felt more literary than literal.

My father is a Black Baptist preacher in the King tradition, he even attended King's alma mater, Morehouse College. As a child, I was encouraged to essentially worship King. His striking face adorns several walls of our home. The sound of his voice moved me to tears before I could even comprehend what he was saying. It was the sound of truth. Truth so deep it both hurt and inspired. As I grew older I was indoctrinated with the King story and was encouraged by my father to explore beyond King's 1963 plea for racial equality.

After his life was tragically cut short, as was a similarly honest and righteous Robert Kennedy a few months later, we, not just in the black community, but a nation as a whole, have spent the past forty years trying to grapple with his legacy. The mainstream media would like us to look at "I Have a Dream" and virtually nothing else. They can package that speech as a nice two-minute nostalgia clip. But I believe every good progressive American should look more to the King of '68 for inspiration.

By that time King's house had already been firebombed. He'd been wiretapped, stabbed, and assaulted with a brick. He was never uncontroversial and although he never officially claimed to be a member of any political party his positions and message were unapologetically progressive. These were in some ways darker times than his earlier more celebrated days during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the peace he helped achieve in Birmingham.

During the final two years of his life, King took on the far more complex de facto racism of northern cities like Chicago, addressed labor inequality, and took a very bold and highly criticized stance against the Vietnam War:

"As I have walked," King told the crowd assembled in Riverside Church a year before his assassination, "among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

By 1968, King's opposition to Vietnam and his unwavering commitment to nonviolence made him largely an outcast. The far right still despised him and everything he represented. But even more telling was the rejection he received from the left. He endured editorials from the Democratic establishment calling for a moratorium on civil rights and a break from marches. He was called a "disservice to his cause" and his people. New, younger voices in the Civil Rights Movement began ridiculing his non-violent stance, calling him out-of-touch and out-of-date.

Only the anti-war movement was prescient enough to see the wisdom of King's views at that time. In fact, there were efforts to recruit King to run for president on a ticket with activist and baby book guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, but King wasn't interested.

Now, forty years after his death, it seems like almost everyone wants to claim King. Mitt Romney got himself embroiled in controversy when he claimed to have seen his father march with King as a child, only to have to later admit that he didn't actually see anything of the sort and the "with" was most likely only in spirit as opposed to actuality.

On the Democratic side, Senators Obama and Clinton sparred when Obama tried to draw parallels between himself and King and Clinton tried to, in a characteristically self-serving way, suggest that King would not have been able to see his dream fulfilled (with the '64 Civil Rights Act, and '65 Voting Rights Act) if it hadn't been for legislators like LBJ (i.e. her).

The King they all hope to be identified with is the beatific, gloriously positive King of 1963, but I am fairly certain that none of them would be as comfortable linking themselves to the irascible, fiercely antiwar and increasingly radical King of 1968.

That King would most likely have just as vociferously opposed the Iraq War today as he did the Vietnam War then. This is the King who launched a "Poor People's Campaign," a thoroughly progressive campaign that was considered ambitious for its time and whose job has yet to be completed in part because King was killed, but also because its goal, of organizing America’s poor to fight for economic justice with regards to both compensation and treatment, was so large that no single leader could accomplish it on their own. The "Poor People's Campaign" extended beyond the African-American community. The goal was a "multiracial army of the poor" including whites, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

King traveled to severely impoverished communities with camera crews to shed light on poverty in America, knowing that there would be no symbolic victories or positive press coverage. King called for a "radical redistribution of economic power" in 1968, words that no establishment politician would be happy to associate themselves with expressing today.

During this period King was growing more certain of the inevitability of his own death. Only 39-years old, with young children and his wife at home, he put his life on the line every single day for nearly a decade. None of our current crop of candidates on either side can hold a candle to what he experienced in terms of burden and sacrifice.

Most of us know the vague details of Dr. King's murder in April of 1968, but few point out that he was in Memphis at the time in support of a racially polarizing labor dispute involving black sanitation workers. "All labor has dignity," Dr. King told the striking workers, "but you're doing another thing. You are reminding not only Memphis, but the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

Right before his death he had been delayed getting on a flight because of a bomb threat and his mortality was very much on his mind when he delivered his final -- and some argue greatest -- speech, in which he said:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Even if the spiritual content and motivation of his words don't ring true for you, the essence of his bearing certainly should. King was a fighter and he would not relent in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Forty years after his death, our nation is in a state of crisis economically, socially, racially, internationally and environmentally. We may be looking at yet another election for the presidency where we may have little choice but to pick between the lesser of two evils.

And yet King's passion is still with us, only if we choose to access it. Just because he was motivated by love and peace, that doesn't mean that his message needed to be soft spoken and genteel. It can be and should be about reclaiming power. King himself said:

"There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love."

So this year, when the cable network repeat the "I Have a Dream" speech over and over again and intersperse it with the talking heads that bicker about whether or not King's hope for racial equality has been achieved, think of the King of '68 who fought for labor, fought against war, and launched a powerful movement that is very much still alive today and whose work is still not finished.

Obama (part 99 and a half)

2008-01-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

Obama's "value-free" take on Ronald Reagan's presidency here is a bit disturbing:

The old maxim that says "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" holds true here. Conservatives hate Hillary Clinton for who she is. They hate John Edwards for what he says. And they can live with Barack Obama, who could finish off the Clintons, who eschews edgy populism for "hope" and who this week said of a certain conservative: "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

The soundest response to Obama's insights regarding Reagan comes from the man whose populism so unsettled the Review-Journal.

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," said John Edwards. "He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country... He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."

"I can promise you this," the former senator from North Carolina concluded, "this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

what was i saying? (a freestyle)

2008-01-17T21:18:00.000-08:00

...

crushed ice

wet and warmed

pebbles of consciousness

laved to soft and soundless bursting:

a metaphor

of the slippage of thought

Gloria Steinem ETHERED

2008-01-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

Melissa Harris-Lacewell pretty much destroys Gloria Steinem in this debate. I think she's my new hero(ine). Check out her website. I'm ordering her book and checking out her blog.

January 14, 2008

Race and Gender in Presidential Politics: A Debate Between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris-Lacewell

In the race for the Democratic nomination, a victory for either Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama—as the first woman or African American Democratic nominee—would be unprecedented in U.S. history. We host a discussion on race and gender politics with feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem and Princeton University Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

Guests:
Gloria Steinem, feminist pioneer and bestselling author of several books, including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. In the early ‘70s she founded Ms. Magazine and New York magazine and also helped organize the National Women’s Political Caucus. More recently she co-founded the Women’s Media Center in 2004.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She is at work on a new book called For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn’t Enough.

AMY GOODMAN: The results from Iowa and New Hampshire have placed Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the current frontrunners for the Democratic nomination. A victory for either of them as the first woman or African American Democratic nominee, not to mention president, would be unprecedented in American history.

In recent days, their differences over foreign and domestic policy have taken a backseat. Instead, questions of race and gender have dominated the political contest between them. The debate came to a head over a comment made by Senator Clinton in an interview on Fox News.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do; presidents before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said, “We’re going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.

AMY GOODMAN: After Clinton made those remarks, Senator Obama and several others criticized her for minimizing Dr. King’s role in securing the Civil Rights Act. NBC host Tim Russert questioned Senator Clinton about this on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. Clinton emphasized race or gender should have nothing to do with the campaign.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: This is the most exciting election we’ve had in such a long time, because you have an African American, an extraordinary man, a person of tremendous talents and abilities, running to become our president; you have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us want to inject race or gender in this campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we host a discussion on race and gender politics in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Gloria Steinem is a feminist pioneer, a bestselling writer. She founded Ms. Magazine, helped organize the National Women’s Political Caucus in the early ’70s, and in 2004 co-founded the Women’s Media Center. Gloria Steinem recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Times supporting Hillary Clinton. It’s titled “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” She argues Senator Obama could never have been a viable candidate if he were a woman and asks, “Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” Gloria Steinem joins me here in the firehouse studio.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She is at work on a new book called For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn’t Enough. Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a Barack Obama supporter. She joins us now from Princeton, New Jersey.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Gloria Steinem, let’s begin with you. You laid out a hypothetical in your op-ed piece, in your column. Why don’t you lay it out for us here?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I was just—I think one learns a lot from parallels, and so it would be interesting to try to project what would have happened to Barack Obama in his life if he had been a female human being. I mean, I really think that we have seen historically that women of color, African American women, have understood—have been just in a better position, you know, to understand the roles of both sex and race, and it made me nostalgic for the days of Shirley Chisholm and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, you know, it was so clear that, you know, because one didn’t have to choose between race and gender. And indeed, I am still trying not to choose between race and gender, because the basis of my choice was not that, but that, in fact, Hillary Clinton will arrive in Washington knowing how Washington works, because she’s had it written on her skin like Kafka in The Prisoner—wasn’t it?—when—and I think we can’t afford really—we’re in such dire circumstances that to have the first couple of years of Carter or even the first couple of years of Clinton again, who arrived in Washington not understanding how Washington worked. But if Barack Obama is the candidate, I will work for him with a whole heart. And I wish we had preferential voting, you know, so we can go one, two and three, at least, rather than having to choose only one.

AMY GOODMAN: You hadn’t originally come out for Hillary Clinton.

GLORIA STEINEM: No, my first column on this subject was essentially taking to task the media, who were asking us, trying to force us to choose prematurely and asking me, “Are you supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?” And I would always just say yes, because it seemed to me wrong that they were, you know, so forced on—so focused on this long before the primaries.

AMY GOODMAN: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, your thoughts on this discussion about race and gender?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I mean, honestly, I’m appalled by the parallel that Ms. Steinem draws in the beginning part of the New York Times article. What she’s trying to do there is to make a claim towards sort of bringing in black women into a coalition around questions of gender and asking us to ignore the ways in which race and gender intersect. This is actually a standard problem of second-wave feminism, which, although there have been twenty-five years now—oh, going on forty years, actually, of African American women pushing back against this, have really failed to think about the ways in which trying to appropriate black women’s lives’ experience in that way is really offensive, actually.

And so, when Steinem suggests, for example, in that article that Obama is a lawyer married to another lawyer and to suggest that, for example, Hillary Clinton represents some kind of sort of breakthrough in questions of gender, I think that ignores an entire history in which white women have in fact been in the White House. They’ve been there as an attachment to white male patriarchal power. It’s the same way that Hillary Clinton is now making a claim towards experience. It’s not her experience. It’s her experience married to, connected to, climbing up on white male patriarchy. This is exactly the ways in which this kind of system actually silences questions of gender that are more complicated than simply sort of putting white women in positions of power and then claiming women’s issues are cared for.

Now, what I know from the work that I’ve done on the Obama campaign is that there are tens of thousands of extremely hard-working white men and women, as well as black men and women, as well as actually a huge multiracial and interethnic coalition of people working for Barack Obama. And so, for Steinem to sort of make this very clear race and gender dichotomy that she does in that New York Times op-ed piece, I think it’s the very worst of second-wave feminism.

AMY GOODMAN: Gloria Steinem?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, it’s very painful to hear her say that, because what I meant was the opposite, you know, was to bring into the discussion the equal treatment of these kinds of questions, because—I mean, I didn’t want to write this. I was sitting there trying to do my own work and not do this, but I got so alarmed at the way that Hillary Clinton was being treated almost porno-–not just almost—pornographically, in ways that you can’t even mention in the New York Times.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, you know, that there were—there is pornography on the—you know, about her. There’s nutcrackers and with her legs as nutcrackers. There’s all kinds of—Chris Matthews saying, you know, if she hadn’t got the sympathy vote because of her husband’s affairs, she could never be in the US Senate. There’s people yelling in the crowd that—you know, “Iron my shirt!” or “Marry me!” or whatever it is.

And, you know, if we’re going to unleash the talents that we so desperately need in all of the country and do away with the system we have now, which has produced George Bush, who would be selling used cars if he didn’t have a famous father, if he weren’t white, if he weren’t rich—maybe not even selling used cars—we need to enlarge the talent pool in every direction. So my plea was really directed at the press to take all forms of discrimination seriously. And I’m very sorry if the parallel, you know, was not—didn’t make that clear in the beginning.

AMY GOODMAN: Melissa Harris-Lacewell?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Yeah, I absolutely agree that electing another president whose path to the White House is basically through either parental or familial connection is an absolute travesty for our democracy. Our democracy should not read—I don’t want my daughter, who’s six now, to go off to high school and read, you know, a story that says Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Clinton. I actually absolutely agree that we have to have a deeper bench in American democracy. And that’s part of the reason that I’m a strong supporter of Barack Obama.

This is not, I think, the moment to suggest that one is owed the presidency, that there is kind of a natural line of succession. I think that’s exactly what we don’t want in this country. What we need is a real conversation with people who are willing to be honest about sort of all of the elements of who we are as people: our citizenship, our race, our gender.

And I will say that I am really offended by the ways in which the Hillary Clinton campaign has not taken the high road on this. They’ve consistently used ways of thinking about her as Bill Clinton’s wife. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot both claim this sort of role as independent woman making a stand on questions of feminism and claim that your experience begins as First Lady of Arkansas. You know, you simply have to stand on your own or not. There are dozens of white women in this country who I would be a huge supporter of for the American presidency. The president of my own university would be at the top of that list, but not someone who is making this claim towards being president as her right as a result of a relationship with a former president. I think that’s exactly what we don’t need in third-wave feminism.

AMY GOODMAN: Gloria Steinem?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I do think that we need to be able to understand the value of all experience, including that experience which has been limited too much by race or by gender. And, for instance, there is a move at a populist level to attribute an economic value to the work of care giving, which is 90% done by women, but by some men, at replacement value and make that deductible if you pay taxes and, you know, refundable if you don’t, to understand the value of two-thirds of the work in the country, which is care-giving work. So just because it is a female role or just because it is a role that has been limited by race does not mean it was not a valuable—we need to be able to value that, as well.

But here’s my idea. There are good feminists, I think, you know, and good people inside all three campaigns, and that is a first, you know, because all of the candidates are—you know, we have differences, big differences, with all of them—or at least I do—but they are pretty good people. Their heads and their hearts are connected, and the issues are not too bad. So, you know, I’m hoping that because there are good feminists inside all three campaigns, we can join together and keep them from attacking each other.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to go to break, and then we’re going to come back. Our guest here in New York in the firehouse studio, Gloria Steinem; and at Princeton University, joining us is Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. She’s associate professor of politics and African American studies. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. And we’d like to know how you feel. You can email us at mail@democracynow.org. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about race and gender in presidential politics, our guests: in Princeton University, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton; and joining us in our firehouse studio is Gloria Steinem, who wrote a New York Times op-ed piece.

And just for the record, the beginning of that piece read—let me just bring it up right here so I correctly quote it. It says, "The woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

“Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?” That’s the beginning of that quote.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, as we were ending right before the segment close, you wanted to say something.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, only that, I mean, I am an unmarried working mother. I certainly understand, in a very intimate way, you know, the power and the value of domestic and caretaking work. But I also know very clearly a history that I believe Steinem’s piece attempted to distort, and that is that as white women moved into the workforce, much of that caretaking work did not go to white men who sort of took up and helped out, but it fell on women of color—African American women, immigrant women—who stepped in to do much of the domestic labor and childcare provision, so that white women could in fact become a part of the workforce. So to, for example, make an argument like black men had the right to vote long before white women is to ignore that black men were then lynched regularly for any attempt to actually exercise that right.

I just feel that we have got to get clear about the fact that race and gender are not these clear dichotomies in which, you know, you’re a woman or you’re black. I’m sitting here in my black womanhood body, knowing that it is more complicated than that. African American men have been complicit in the oppression of African American women. White women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women. Those things are true. And so, to pretend that we can somehow take them out of the conversation when a white woman runs against a black man, when she tears up at being sort of beat up by him, when her husband can come in and rally around her and suggest that we need to sort of support her because she’s having difficulties, while Barack Obama is getting death threats, basically lynching threats on him and his family, these are—for a second-wave feminist with an understanding of the complexity of American race and gender to take this kind of position in the New York Times struck me as, again, the very worst of what that feminism can offer—in other words, division.

AMY GOODMAN: Gloria Steinem?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I was trying to be, and I think, from the response I’ve been getting, I was mainly taken as, unifying. And the whole—the end of the piece, the context of the piece is that we need to take all kinds of restrictions seriously. So, you know, and I think the—I wish the rest of the paragraph about the black man getting the vote first had been there, because, in fact, as Sojourner Truth pointed out, if the coalition had remained together and white and black women had remained part of the drive for universal adult suffrage, it’s possible that there would have been less violence faced at the polls, because there would have been white women and black women coming to the polls together, if the coalition had stayed together. So, you know, my argument is for coalition and staying together.

And I must say, for conversations like these—I mean, you know, I think, you know, we’re conversing through a screen here, but I felt there was some more understanding now than there was when we started out, you know? And we need to have more of this conversation. And since I really believe the historical pattern is going to obtain and Obama is going to be the candidate, in fact—

AMY GOODMAN: You do think that?

GLORIA STEINEM: I do think that, yeah. I mean, who knows?

AMY GOODMAN: What makes you think that?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: What historical pattern?

GLORIA STEINEM: I think the historical pattern of, you know, military leadership in the White House, for instance, which usually has been men, and, you know, all of those things. So we’re going to end up working in coalition. And this is, in any case, the first election of the twenty-first century, which is a positive thing to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Harris-Lacewell?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, again, you know, this is a bizarre reading of history, this notion of sort of African American men somehow standing over and above white women. I’m just not sure exactly what history is being claimed here, particularly in electoral history. We know that there are far more white women in both the House of Representatives and in the US Senate than there are African Americans, either men or women. So it’s an odd sort of claim to make that Barack Obama’s gender is this kind of clear straight line.

What I do agree with is that we ought to be in coalition. But I think we’ve got to be in coalition on fair grounds. Part of what, again, has been sort of an anxiety for African American women feminists like myself is that we’re often asked to join up with white women’s feminism, but only on their own terms, as long as we sort of remain silent about the ways in which our gender, our class, our sexual identity doesn’t intersect, as long as we can be quiet about those things and join onto a single agenda. So, yes, I absolutely agree, we must be in coalition, but it must be a fair coalition of equals.

And it’s one of the things that’s exciting about Barack Obama’s campaign, working on it in New Hampshire, seeing it at work in Iowa, being a part of meetings here in New Jersey, is in fact that you cannot pick what an Obama supporter looks like. Obama supporters are young and old, black and white, male and female. And it is, in fact, the most sort of nurturing and coalition-building space I’ve ever had an opportunity to do political work in.

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, then that’s all the more reason that it deserves and probably will, you know, take the nomination. But I do think that to say—to give the women’s movement to white women is not historically accurate, you know, to give the second wave to it, because in my experience, the women of the National Welfare Rights Organization, you know, many individual women, were in the leadership of the women’s movement always. So—

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Absolutely. I mean, I think women of color have been pushing back and challenging. But, I mean, to suggest that it was always just sort of about this clear sisterhood that didn’t have all of these anxieties would, I mean, be to ignore again sort of the best historiographies out there, as well as kind of the personal stories of women who were part of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, NOW. Again, not that black women are not a big part of thinking about reproductive rights, about thinking about voting rights, but it’s also been true that thinking about those issues has often required a silence—in the same ways, by the way, the civil rights movement has often asked African American women to silence their gendered positions in order to be in solidarity with the race.

I’m just suggesting that maybe if we look through the prism of black women’s experience and not just to try to use black women’s experience as a kind of, you know, look at how much harder it is for women, but instead to really try to understand that intersectional experience, I think we’d come to a clearer perspective.

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I wasn’t making Barack Obama into a European American person. I was assuming that he would be in this hypothetical, which is a lead into an article to, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask—

GLORIA STEINEM: —that obviously he would be at this intersection—he would be both a female human being and an African American human being—and to consider that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you the question about war and peace. I mean, the earliest community in this country, population, African Americans, the largest group who were opposed to the war from the very beginning and also iced out of the corporate media. Do you think that plays a big role here? I wanted to play this clip of Senator Clinton. She voted for the war in Iraq in 2002. This is some of what she said on the Senate floor at that time.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interest of our nation, and it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein, “This is your last chance. Disarm our be disarmed.”

AMY GOODMAN: Now I’ll play a short exchange about Senator Clinton’s Iraq vote in yesterday, Sunday morning’s interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: It is absolutely unfair to say that the vote, as Chuck Hagel, who was one of the architects of the resolution, has said, was a vote for war. It was a vote to use the threat of force against Saddam Hussein, who never did anything without being made to do so.

TIM RUSSERT: The title of the act was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Tim Russert questioning Hillary Clinton. Your response, Gloria?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, she said, “arm or be disarmed.” I mean, this is a conundrum. I utterly disagree with her vote, 100% disagree with her vote. If we had been in that position, being shown all this false information and so on, I don’t exactly know how we would have voted, but I certainly disagree with her vote.

AMY GOODMAN: And that issue playing in here in the race between Obama and Clinton, that Obama came out early opposed to war.

GLORIA STEINEM: Yeah. I think that that’s a great advantage for Obama, in fact. He wasn’t being asked to vote under the same circumstances. And in some sense, we need to compare votes that took place under the same circumstances in the time in which they overlapped on the Senate—in the Senate. But he was speaking out, and that’s very important. And it’s, you know, part of the reason that all this time when people said to me, “Are supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?” I always said yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, you were in New Hampshire. We spoke to you right before the vote came in. At that time, the polls were saying Barack Obama was going to win. Your thoughts now?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, not only was I in New Hampshire, I was also in Illinois. I taught at the University of Chicago for years before coming to Princeton. So Barack Obama was my state senator. He was my US senator. So every time I hear people say he doesn’t have much experience, I find it extremely irritating, because it means that somehow representing me in my government meant very little experience. So I actually was there in Chicago and in Illinois when Senator Obama took those stands against the war, and I can tell you, it was not an easy thing to do. So I’m appreciative of having been represented by someone like him who had those kinds of positions.

I mean, what happened in New Hampshire, clearly Barack Obama brought in the percentage in the polls that he was expected to bring in. But a whole new group of voters showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton. It doesn’t look as though Barack Obama’s poll voters actually abandoned him. It looked as though they actually came and sincerely voted their interest, which I think is a great sign for the capacity of this campaign to move forward. But there was a whole new group of voters, mostly women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, white women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, who did show up at the polls and vote—cast a vote for Hillary Clinton. And that’s what put her over the top.

And I do believe that much of that had to do with this intersection of race and gender, the ways in which Hillary Clinton became discernible, understandable and recognizable to these voters in her moment of anxiety and stress, in a way that Barack Obama, as an African American man, remains alien to many white women. In other words, it’s just very difficult for them to see themselves in him. But again, 36% of that vote who claimed that they were going to vote for Barack did in fact show up and do so. So I think it’s good news for the Obama campaign, although it does continue to indicate the ways in which white women’s particular race and gender position can be of major benefit to them when running against an African American man.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, are white women being racist when they vote for Hillary Clinton? I do not know. We’d have to look into the heart of every person who’s voting.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s not what I said.

GLORIA STEINEM: Alright, good, but—

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Yeah, I—in fact, I’ve regularly said that I don’t think that naked racism explains this. He could not have gotten the kind of support that he got in New Hampshire. Again, what I’m suggesting—and this goes again to this question of complexity—is that our understanding and expectation of who white women are and how we respond to their suffering is quite different historically than how we respond to the suffering, anxiety and stress of African American men and women. So the people who said they were going to vote for Barack Obama apparently voted for him, that 36% . But a whole new group felt motivated to come out and vote for Hillary Clinton, and that seems to be related to her particular sort of performance on the Monday before the election. And that does seem to me to be indicated in questions of race and gender, without saying that these people are naked racists.

I’m incredibly impressed by the voters of New Hampshire, who take very seriously the trust in which the rest of us as citizens put into them to make a decision, because so often we are disenfranchised from the process, because the early primary system allows just a few voters to make these critical choices. And over and over again, the people of New Hampshire were very serious in how they were trying to gather information and make decisions. I would not disparage them by claiming they are racist. I would, however, say they’re part of the American historical system that responds to white women suffering in very particular ways, and it cannot see African American suffering in the same ways.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Professor Lacewell, I spoke to you on Jesse Jackson’s show, on Keep Hope Alive, when you were in New Hampshire. And afterwards, I spoke with Reverend Jackson about while—though he’s supporting Obama, he’s not out on the campaign trail for him. It was, of course, right before the New Hampshire primary. We were in New York. And he said basically that Obama was keeping him at arm’s length, and he was respecting that. Your thoughts?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, again, there’s a long Chicago history that goes way back here with these two gentlemen and sort of their relationship to Chicago politics. And we have to remember that as being just sort of the strategy of politics in general.

But the other part of it is, there’s no question that the Obama campaign has run as much as possible a non-racialized campaign. They are not running for president of black America; they are running for the president of the United States of America. And they, I think, have a recognition, from David Axelrod on down, the ways in which race can be polarizing.

I mean, I’m very glad that Ms. Steinem got such positive responses to her op-ed piece. I wrote a piece which hit Slate, in which I sort of made the similar arguments I made here, and I received death threats to myself, to my daughter. I was called a racist, even though I spend most of my hours, you know, working with privileged white students, who I love and adore and work very hard for here at Princeton.

So I have to say that the ways in which race, the moment it shows up, explodes campaigns is part of why the Obama race has sort of kept race at an arm’s distance. And so, many of us who are supporters but not part of the campaign are the ones who end up bringing up race, because the campaign itself does not do so.

GLORIA STEINEM: You know, it’s interesting to me, you know, also, what Melissa is saying, that—I haven’t looked at these polls in a couple of months, but it seems that African American voters are more likely than European—than white voters to think that Obama can’t win and that females, white females, are more likely to think that Clinton can’t win. So, you know, I suspect we’re each responding, or those groups are responding to their individual life experiences, so, you know—which supports what she’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: Though—I mean, I don’t want to bring up any polls now, because we know how wrong they can be. Though when you look at this new ABC poll in South Carolina, it is shifted dramatically, the African American population, from being, when polled, supposedly—

GLORIA STEINEM: Yeah, because now it seems possible.

AMY GOODMAN: —well over 60% .

GLORIA STEINEM: Yeah. Now it seems more possible. So, in the absence of evidence, you know, now it’s changed.

AMY GOODMAN: Sam Husseini in Washington, D.C. raised an interesting question about pollsters asking the question, not who do you think will be president, but who do you want to see president—

GLORIA STEINEM: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —which would be—could be a very different answer.

GLORIA STEINEM: Yes. No, that would be very good. And I do wish we had preferential voting, too. I think a lot of Americans do at this moment in time.

AMY GOODMAN: And you mean by that?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I mean so that you could vote one, two and three. You don’t just have to bullet-vote one person, which contributes to this hierarchical nature, and so on.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, there was a person who put that out as a possibility, and that was Lonnie Guinier, who talked about all the ways—

GLORIA STEINEM: Yes, right.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: —in which we’d have a more fair and democratic system. And the Clintons walked away from her.

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, as an appointee, yes, they walked away. And I disagree with that, too. You know, I refuse to be—you know, we have to win this election, and we have to win our humanity, in addition and along the way. And I—you know, I refuse to be divided on this, you know? It seems to me that when—fundamentally, when we have to keep talking and keep honoring each other’s opinions and move against the forces that Nader just described.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lacewell, that shift we are now seeing in South Carolina, if in fact the polls are correct?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Yeah, it’s probably two things. One, when the early polling was demonstrating among African Americans that Hillary Clinton was leading Barack Obama, a great deal of that had to do with name recognition. As Barack Obama has become increasingly a household name, a visible candidate, he’s moved up on everyone’s list.

The other piece of it is, unquestionably, sort of, I think, two dynamics around race in American politics. One is that as the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire have demonstrated a willingness to vote for a black candidate, it’s made African Americans more likely to be optimistic about his ability to win and therefore not to be throwing their vote away. There’s a lot of anxiety that you don’t throw your vote away; you have to back a winner. Now it looks like Barack Obama can be a winner. So you see more strategic voting on the part of African Americans.

The other part is that African Americans, early on, had a great deal of anxiety about Barack, because he had almost too much white support. In other words, he was getting so few questions about race that I think it raised some anxieties for African American voters, who were sort of asking, well, if there are all of these people in the media, if there are all of these white voters who are interested in you, does that mean that you’re not with us, that you do not share our interests, because historically, people who have been supported by these large coalitions have not been for the interests of African Americans?

So I think, increasingly, actually as sort of the racial attack machine shows up against Obama, I think this, in certain ways, is supportive of a black vote, who says, “Oh, I see. Actually, they’re not completely for you. They’ll send out people like Bob Johnson of BET to suggest, you know, terrible things about you and to disparage you personally.” And when that sort of attack occurs, I think it actually supports—increases the amount of support among most African Americans, although the key here is to remember, African Americans, like white women, are not a monolithic voting group. They do not make all decisions together. We don’t have a straw vote first and then decide who we’re going to support. We’re independent individual citizens making choices. And I’m excited that African Americans have a choice like this in this election.

AMY GOODMAN: Final word, Gloria Steinem?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I just think we have to be able to call each other up. You know, I mean, my friends who are working in the Obama campaign called me up and said someone, not Hillary Clinton, but someone for Hillary Clinton, an organization, was saying that Obama—was distorting Obama’s record on safe and legal abortion. And so, you know, if we can—backstage—and, you know, so I called up and tried to do my best to eliminate that distortion, to make sure it wasn’t happening. And I hope that having that on your television show now, we can call each other up, and when—you know, I can’t promise, and probably nobody can promise, to control a campaign, but at least if we have a kind of network inside the three campaigns—the three campaigns—we can call each other up when there are distortions, when there are things that are attacks that seem unfair.

AMY GOODMAN: The third campaign, you’re referring to Edwards?

GLORIA STEINEM: Pardon?

AMY GOODMAN: The third campaign?

GLORIA STEINEM: Is Edwards, right. And, you know, I think that’s important, because there are all these political consultants doing the opposite. You know, they’re trying to push them apart and trying to make them more aggressive. So I really would like to see a kind of third force of all of us who obviously share issues inside these three campaigns, who essentially say, if you don’t cut this out, you know, to the consultants, we’ll quit in public or do whatever we need to do to try to make it a campaign on the issues, more accuracy without false accusations.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there, and I thank you very much—leave it there for today, but continue this very important discussion. Gloria Steinem has been our guest in studio, well known for her pioneering work in writing, in feminism. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor at Princeton University, associate professor of politics and African American studies, she just returned from New Hampshire, where she was leading students in looking at the US democratic process.

Ishmael Reed on Obama, the Clintons, Steinem, etc

2008-01-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

The original formatting for the article can be found here. A very interesting take on things as they stand in the Democratic primary as well as a persuasive prediction of how things will turn out if Hillary Clinton is nominated:

January 14, 2008

Going Old South on Obama

Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man

By ISHMAEL REED

During Bill Clinton's first run for President, I appeared on a New York radio panel with some of his black supporters, including Paul Robeson, Jr., son of the actor and singer. I said that Clinton had character problems. They dismissed my comments and said that I didn't know anything about politics and should stick to writing novels. (Clarence Page, who has monopoly on the few column inches and airtime made available to black columnists by the corporate media, said the same thing about me. I should stick to creative writing and leave politics alone.)

These criticisms didn't deter me. Writing in The Baltimore Sun, I was the first to identify Clinton as a black president as a result of his mimicking a black style. (I said he was the second, since Warren G. Harding never denied the rumors about his black ancestry.) As a result of his ability to imitate the black preaching style, Clinton was able to seduce black audiences, who ignored some of his actions that were unfriendly, even hostile to blacks. His interrupting his campaign to get a mentally disabled black man, Ricky Ray Rector executed. (Did Mrs. Clinton tear up about this act?) His humiliation of Jesse Jackson. His humiliation of Jocelyn Elders and Lani Gunier. The welfare reform bill that has left thousands of women black, white, yellow and brown destitute, prompting Robert Scheer to write in the San Francisco Chronicle, "To his everlasting shame as president, Clinton supported and signed welfare legislation that shredded the federal safety net for the poor from which he personally had benefited." (Has Ms. Clinton shed a tear for these women, or did she oppose her husband's endorsement of this legislation?) His administration saw a high rate of black incarceration as a result of Draconian drug laws that occurred during his regime. He advocated trade agreements that sent thousands of jobs overseas. (Did Mrs. Clinton, with misty eyes, beg him to assess how such trade deals would effect the livelihood of thousands of families, black, white, brown, red and yellow?) He refused to intervene to rescue thousands of Rwandans from genocide. (Did Mrs. Clinton tearfully beseech her husband to intervene on behalf of her African sisters; did Ms. Gloria Steinem, whose word is so influential among millions of white women that she can be credited by some for changing the outcome of a primary, and maybe an election, marshal these forces to place pressure upon Congress to rescue these black women and girls?)

Carl Bernstein, appearing on "Air America Radio," January 9th, described Clinton's New Hampshire attacks on Obama as "petulant." His behavior demonstrated that regardless of Bill Clinton's admiration for Jazz, and black preaching, he and his spouse will go south on a black man whom they perceive as being audacious enough to sass Mrs. Clinton. In this respect, he falls in the tradition of the southern demagogue: grinning with and sharing pot liker and cornbread with black folks, while signifying about them before whites. Though his role models are Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, he has more in common with Georgia's Eugene Talmadge ("The Wild Man From Sugar Creek,"), Louisiana's Huey Long, and his brother, Earl, Edwin Edwards, who even hinted that he had black ancestry to gain black votes, Alabama's George Wallace, Texas's Pa Ferguson, and "Kissing Jim" Folsom, who wrote, "You Are My Sunshine." He employs the colorful rhetoric of the southern demagogue, the rustic homilies ("till the last dog dies), the whiff of corruption.

Having been educated at elite schools where studying The War of the Roses was more important than studying Reconstruction, the under educated white male punditry and their token white women, failed to detect the racial code phrases that both Clintons and their surrogates sent out- codes that, judging from their responses, infuriated blacks caught immediately. Blacks have been deciphering these hidden messages for four hundred years. They had to, in order to survive.

Gloria Steinem perhaps attended the same schools. Her remark that black men received the vote "fifty years before women," in a Times Op-Ed (Jan.8) which some say contributed to Obama's defeat in New Hampshire, ignores the fact that black men were met by white terrorism, including massacres, and economic retaliation when attempting to exercise the franchise. She and her followers, who've spent thousands of hours in graduate school, must have gotten all of their information about Reconstruction from Gone With The Wind, where moviegoers are asked to sympathize with a proto-feminist, Scarlett O'Hara, who finally has to fend for herself after years of being doted upon by the unpaid household help. Booker T. Washington, an educator born into slavery, said that young white people had been waited on so that after the war they didn't know how to take care of themselves and Mary Chesnutt, author of The Civil War Diaries, and a friend of Confederate president Jefferson Davis's family, said that upper class southern white women were so slave dependent that they were "indolent." Steinem and her followers should read, Redemption, The Last Battle Of The Civil War," by Nicholas Lemann, which tells the story about how "in 1875, an army of white terrorists in Mississippi led a campaign to 'redeem' their state--to abolish with violence and murder if need be, the newly won civil rights of freed slaves and blacks." Such violence and intimidation was practiced all over the south sometimes resulting in massacres. One of worst massacres of black men occurred at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. Their crime? Attempting to exercise the voting rights awarded to them "fifty years," before white women received theirs. Lemann writes, "Burning Negroes" met "savage and hellish butchery.

"They were all killed, unarmed, at close range, while begging for mercy. Those who tried to escape, were overtaken, mustered in crowds, made to stand around, and, while in every attitude of humiliation and supplication, were shot down and their bodies mangled and hacked to hasten their death or to satiate the hellish malice of their heartless murderers, even after they were dead.

"White posses on horseback rode away from the town, looking for Negroes who had fled, so they could kill them."

Elsewhere in the south, during the Confederate Restoration, black politicians, who were given the right to vote," fifty years before white women" were removed from office by force, many through violence. In Wilmington, North Carolina, black men, who "received the vote fifty years before white women," the subject of Charles Chesnutt's great novel, The Marrow of Tradition:

"On Thursday, November 10, 1898, Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, a Democratic leader in Wilmington, North Carolina mustered a white mob to retaliate for a controversial editorial written by Alexander Manly, editor of the city's black newspaper, the Daily Record. The mob burned the newspaper's office and incited a bloody race riot in the city. By the end of the week, at least fourteen black citizens were dead, and much of the city's black leadership had been banished. This massacre further fueled an ongoing statewide disfranchisement campaign designed to crush black political power. Contemporary white chronicles of the event, such as those printed in the Raleigh News and Observer and Wilmington's The Morning Star, either blamed the African American community for the violence or justified white actions as necessary to keep the peace. African American writers produced their own accounts-including fictional examinations-that countered these white supremacist claims and highlighted the heroic struggles of the black community against racist injustice."

Black congressmen, who, as a rule, were better educated than their white colleagues were expelled from Congress.

Either Gloria Steinem hasn't done her homework, or as an ideologue rejects evidence that's a Google away, and the patriarchal corporate old media, which has appointed her the spokesperson for feminism, permits her ignorance to run rampant over the emails and blogs of the nation and though this white
Oprah might have inspired her followers to march lockstep behind
her, a progressive like Cindy Sheehan wasn't convinced. She called Mrs. Clinton's crying act," phony."

Moreover, some of the suffragettes that she and her followers hail as feminist pioneers were racists. Some even endorsed the lynching of black men. In an early clash between a black and white feminist, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells opposed the views of Frances Willard, a suffragette pioneer, who advocated lynching.

"As the president of one of America's foremost social reform organizations, Frances Willard called for the protection of the purity of white womanhood from threats to morality and safety. In her attempts to bring Southern women into the W.C.T.U., Frances Willard accepted the rape myth and publicly condoned lynching and the color line in the South. Wells argued that as a Christian reformer, Willard should be speaking out against lynching, but instead seemed to support the position of Southerners."

Ms. Willard's point of view is echoed by Susan Brownmiller's implying that Emmett Till got what he deserved, and the rush to judgment on the part of New York feminists whose pressure helped to convict the black and Hispanic kids accused of raping a stockbroker in Central Park. After DNA proved their innocence (the police promised them if they confessed, they could go home), a Village Voice reporter asked the response of these feminists to this news; only Susan Brownmiller responded. She said that regardless of the scientific evidence, she still believed that the children, who spent their youth in jail, on the basis of the hysteria generated by Donald Trump, the press, and leading New York feminists, were guilty.

Feminist hero, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, offended Frederick Douglass--an abolitionist woman attempted to prevent his daughter from gaining entrance to a girls' school--when she referred to black men as "sambos." She was an unabashed white supremacist. She said in 1867," [w]ith the black man we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life."

Steinem should read. Race, Rape, and Lynching by Sandra Gunning, and Angela Davis's excellent Women, Culture, & Politics," which includes a probing examination of racism in the suffragette movement. The Times allowed only one black feminist to weigh in on Ms. Steinem's comments about Barack Obama, and how he appealed to white men because they perceive black males as more "masculine" than they, an offensive stereotype, and one that insults the intelligence of white men, and a comment which, with hope, doesn't reflect the depth of "progressive" women's thought.

Do you think that the Times would offer Steinem critics like Toni Morrison Op-ed space to rebut her? Don't count on it. The criticism of white feminism by black women has been repressed for over one hundred years (Black Women Abolitionists, A Study In Activism,1828-1860,by Shirley J.Yee).

I asked Jill Nelson, author of Finding Martha's Vineyard, Volunteer Slavery and Sexual Healing, how she felt about Gloria Steinem's use of a hypothetical black woman to make a point against Obama. She wrote:

"I was offended and frankly, surprised, by Gloria Steinem's use of a hypothetical Black woman in her essay supporting Hillary Clinton. I would have liked to think that after all these years struggling in the feminist vineyards, Black women have become more than a hypothetical to be used when white women want to make a point, and a weak one at that, on our backs. It's a device, a distraction, and disingenuous, and fails to hold Hillary Clinton - or for that matter, Barack Obama and the rest of the (male) candidates - responsible for their politics."

On the second day of a convention held at Seneca Falls, 1848, white suffragettes sought to prevent black abolitionist Sojourner Truth from speaking. The scene was described by Frances Dana Gage in Ms. Davis's book:

"Don't let her speak!" gasped half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announce 'Sojourner Truth,' and begged the audience to keep silence for a few moments."

Many minority feminists, Asian-American, Hispanic, Native-American and African-American, contend that white middle and upper class feminists' insensitivity to the views and issues deemed important to them persists to this day.

Their proof might be Ms. Steinem's lack of concern about how Ms. Clinton's war votes affect the lives of thousands of women and girls--her brown sisters--in Iraq and Iran. One hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi people have been killed since the American occupation was ordered by patriarchs in Washington D.C., patriarchs who were responsible for the welfare reform act.

With this in mind, I recently asked Robin Morgan, who was editor of Ms. magazine, when I was called the worst misogynist in America, whether she still held those views. I replied to this accusation that I should be accorded the same respect given to the men who ran the magazine at the time, Lang Communications. It was made by Barbara Smith, a black feminist whom I debated on television and whose bitter comments about the white feminist movement make mine seem timid. She also criticizes the white Gay and Lesbian movements. She said that when she tried to join the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. That they weren't interested in black issues. That they wanted to mainstream. About me, she wrote in The New Republic magazine, edited by a Marty Peretz, a man who once said that black women were "culturally deficient," that my black women characters weren't positive enough. For running afoul of this feminist "blueprint" for writing that she tried to lay on me, her views and those like hers were repudiated by Joyce Joyce, a black critic who deviates from the party line.

I also reminded Ms. Morgan that the Ms. editorial staff reflected the old plantation model, even though its founder, Gloria Steinem, said that she's concerned about the progress of black women. White feminists had the juicy editorial Big House positions, while women of color were the editorial kitchen help as contributing editors. A few months later, Ms. Morgan resigned as editor and was replaced by a black woman, but not before taking some potshots, not at misogynists belonging to her ethnic group, whose abuse of women has been a guarded secret, according to feminists belonging to that group, but at Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas (incidentally, when the white women who ran for office as a result of Ms. Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas arrived in Congress, they voted with the men).

Robin Morgan had her secretary respond to my recent letter and from the letter I gather that Ms. Morgan hasn't changed her mind. I'm a worse misogynist than the men in the Pentagon, and those who passed Clinton's Welfare Reform bill. I guess that bell hooks, another black feminist, who won't be invited by the men who run the Times to respond to Ms. Steinem, was right when she wrote in her book, Outlaw Culture, that white feminists are harder on black men than white men, but like other black feminists, from the 19th century to the present day, her point has been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when they view feminism, and just about every other subject, all they can see is white! (Except when
it's crime, athletics, and having babies out of wedlock!)

Feminists are harder on Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison (yes, him too), and even James Baldwin, that gentle soul, than on Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. Harder on Barack Obama than on Bill Clinton, to whom Gloria Steinem, a harsh critic of Clarence Thomas, gave a free pass when he was charged with sexual indiscretions by various women. She said that Bubba was O.K. because when he placed Kathleen Wiley's hand on his penis and she said no, he withdrew it. That when other women said no, he also halted his sexual advances. A letter writer to the Times challenged Ms. Steinem's double standard for white and black-men:

"Bob Herbert (column, Jan. 29) writes that Gloria Steinem said that even though Paula Jones has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, Ms. Jones has not claimed that the President had forced himself on her. ''He takes no for an answer,'' Ms. Steinem intones.

Lest we forget, Anita Hill said no to Clarence Thomas. And her accusations nearly derailed his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Patricia Schroeder, the former Congresswoman, did not claim that ''somebody may be overstating the case'' when Ms. Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual misconduct, but Ms. Schroeder claims that now in Mr. Herbert's column. Again the left inadvertently exposes its sliding scale of moral indignation."

RAYMOND BATZ
San Rafael, Calif., Jan. 29, 1998

Black feminists also charge that white feminists deserted them during the fight against Proposition 209, which ended racial and gender hiring in the state of California, even though Affirmative Action has benefited white women the most!

They charge that white women were missing in action during the fight against the welfare reform bill. It seems that the cheapest form of solidarity with which they can express toward their minority sisters is to join in on the attack on Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, and Clarence Thomas and Mr., a character in The Color Purple, who, for them, represents all black men.

Though Steinem accuses men of being mean to Mrs. Clinton, she expressed no outrage about surrogate Bill Shaheen painting Obama as drug dealer, or the innuendo promoted by Senator Bob Kerrey. Senator Bob Kerrey, who, apparently having made up with the Clintons, was recruited to associate Obama with what the
Right refers to as "Islamo fascists."

He said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and his father was a Muslim and his paternal grandmother is a Muslim." He added that Obama "spent a little bit of time in a secular madressa."

You'd think that the New School of Social Research would have fired Kerrey when he admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Now this.

All of these attacks must be what Hillary Clinton meant when she warned her opponents," now the fun begins."

One of the charges made by some black feminists is that white women middle class movement figures embezzle their oppression.

In the New York Times, Gloria Steinem's using a hypothetical black woman to do a house cleaning on Obama was what these women must have had in mind. (Phillip Roth does the same thing; uses his black maid characters to denounce black history and black studies: "Missa Roth, dese Black Studies ain't doin' nothin' but worrying folks. Whew!) Her using a black woman as a prop must have annoyed Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison who made blistering comments about Ms.Steinem during an interview conducted by novelist Cecil Brown and carried in the University of Massachusetts' Review, where Ms. Morrison made the harshest comments about Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, to date, even harsher than those made by black feminist Prof. Trudier Harris, who, as a result of her essay, published in African American Review, faced such a hostile backlash from white feminist scholars that she stopped commenting about the novel, which has become a sacred text among white feminists, who are silent about how women are treated among their ethnic groups. Steinem said that had Obama been a black woman, he would not have made as much progress as a presidential candidate and added that white men would prefer voting for a black man over a white woman because they perceived black men as being more masculine than they.

I wrote a response to the Times:

Jan.8, 2008

Dear Times,

Even Dr. Phil would probably snicker at the level of pop psychology employed by Gloria Steinem to explain the attraction of many voters to Senator Barack Obama. For example, she believes that the preference for a black male candidate over a white woman by some white males is based upon their admiration for the black male's "masculine" superiority. "Masculine superiority?" All four of the current heavyweight champions are white as well as last year's MVPs of the NBA were white men.

Moreover, Ms. Steinem is a long time critic of black men as a group. She said that the book, The Color Purple, in which one black man commits incest, told "the truth" about black men, the kind of collective blame that's been used against her ethnic group since the time of the Romans."

I also made a reference to her abandonment of a tearful Shirley Chisholm's presidential candidacy after supporting it. If she's so concerned about the political fate of a black woman's presidential bid, why did she desert Ms. Chisholm in favor of the man?

She also said that "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life." The fact that when white women received the vote, they experienced little of the violence that accompanied black men being awarded the right to vote, fifty years earlier, suggests that some groups, black men, black women, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and American Indians face more restrictions than white women, whose college enrollment is far higher even than that of white men. ( Steinem said that women are never "Front Runners. How many white women senators are there? How many black?)

Cecil Brown, author of the bestselling Hey, Dude Where's My Black Studies Department, wrote:

"I grew up in North Carolina, where I often heard my mother and my aunts speak of the racism of white women against them. Their experience is that of millions of black women who were and are discriminated by white women.

In the Bay Area, where I now live, a professor friend told me, recently, that a white female student told him that she found the use of the expression, "white woman" in his lectures offensive, and asked that he not use it.

"Like this student, Ms Steinem avoids the phrase "white woman," because it historicizes their gender. While she lectures to us about black men, white men, and black women, she can only think of her white women as women.

"It's time to take pride in breaking all the barriers," Ms. Steinem ends her remarks. We have to be able to say: "I'm supporting [Hillary] because she'll be a great president and because she is a woman. But do we dare say that we should support her because she is a white woman?"

Our letters were not published, but one written by a black feminist exposed the divide between black and white feminists, one that is rarely aired since white feminists have more access to the media than black ones and in their books report, falsely, a solidarity between them and black women.

Among letter writer Karin Kimbrough's comments:

"As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics.

She cites as evidence that 'black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.' So what?

My parents (who are Ms. Steinem's age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed."

Camille Paglia also weighed in:

"Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary."

An example of the problems that Barack faces as a result of there being few blacks having jobs in the old media occurred during an appearance by a white woman reporter on "Washington Journal,"Jan.14. So pro-Hillary was this reporter, Beth Fouhy, that one woman called and said that she thought that this woman was a Hillary spokesperson, before noticing that she was from the
Associated Press. Obviously the media have been infiltrated by Steinem's legions.

Scathing comments about the white feminist movement by black feminists are included in The Feminist Memoir Project, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow. Timesperson,Maureen Dowd also challenged Steinem, who is hard on black guys, but once confessed in the Times that she becomes embarrassed when a male of her ethnic group becomes involved in a scandal. Challenging Steinem's argument that "she is supporting Hillary [because] she had no 'masculinity to prove.'" Dowd wrote, "Empirically speaking, her masculinity is precisely what Hillary
has been out to prove in her bid for the White House. What else was voting to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backing the White House's bellicosity on Iran but proving her masculinity."

Desperate, when the campaign moved into New Hampshire, the Clintons launched the brass knuckles attack on Obama that commentator William Bennett predicted would happen after Mrs. Clinton was upset in Iowa.

His voice shaking with rage, a livid Bill Clinton said that Obama's positions on the war in Iraq was a "a fairy tale," and that nominating Obama was "a roll of the dice."

Writing in The Washington Post, Jan.13, Marjorie Valbrun, voiced the reaction of many blacks to Clinton's performance:

"If anyone needed any proof that the mean Clinton machine is alive and well in this campaign, all they had to do was watch Bill Clinton deliver his angry diatribe against Obama in New Hampshire last week just before the primary. His red-faced anger was clear and a little scary, too. It wasn't what he said but how he said it. His tone was contemptuous of his wife's main challenger, whom he described as a political neophyte who for some reason was being granted a honeymoon with the national media.

This is the same Bill Clinton who took on Sister Souljah, a young and, at the time, controversial black rapper who made incendiary racial remarks after the Los Angeles race riots. Many people accused Clinton of using the rapper, and an appearance before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, as an opportunity to distance himself from Jackson, the ultimate race man. The move helped reinforce his white moderate bona fides."

On Jan.13th, when Tim Russert interrogated Mrs. Clinton whether the attacks on Obama by her, her husband, and her surrogates were racist, she filibustered and dismissed such concerns as the one made by Ms. Valbrum and other blacks in a patronizing manner. She falsely accused Obama of comparing himself with JFK and MLK. He didn't. He invoked their names to make a point about hope. How some hopes, considered false by cynics, can be fulfilled.

So offended by what he considered a black man getting "cocky" with his wife, Clinton blew his top. "Cocky" was the word that nuns educated Bob Herbert used to admonish Obama. Herbert, one of three blacks whom the Times views as unlikely to alienate their readership, pointed to an exchange between Obama and Mrs. Clinton. When Mrs. Clinton, during a debate, commented that voters found Obama more "likeable" than Mrs. Clinton, Obama said that Mrs. Clinton was "likeable enough." Obama's reply prompted an Ante Bellum white man, Karl Rove, to refer to Obama as "a smarmy, prissy little guy taking a slap at her." He said that this exchange threw the primary victory to Mrs. Clinton. Notwithstanding the irony of Karl Rove referring to someone as "smarmy," if a reply as mild and innocuous as Obama's leads to his being flogged by Clinton and reprimanded by one of the Establishment's Black tokens, Obama is going to be restricted in his ability to take on the political brawlers and hit persons aligned with Clinton like Don Imus's buddy, James Carville, a man who sneers at people who live in trailer parks, and who practices a no-holds-barred political strategy.

Both CNN and Carl Bernstein said that Clinton, in the midst of giving this uppity black the required flogging (Clinton's a Jeffersonian. Flogging blacks was Jefferson's idea of recreation), had misrepresented Barack's record. Also, those who commented about Hillary Clinton's tearful breakdown missed the commentary that accompanied this calculated attempt at seeming human and personal, which occurred, as Jesse Jackson, Jr. noted, in The Daily News, when her advisors told her that she appear to be more human. "Why didn't she cry for the victims of Katrina?" he added.

She said that she didn't want to see the country "go backwards," or "spin out of control," the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W.Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and Neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full." (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post election violence in Kenya where Barack's father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton's Willie Horton moment.

Bill Clinton's orchestrating his wife's being more personal, was a brilliant stroke. One that might doom Obama's candidacy, but will doom the Democrats' chances to win the 2008 election as well. As a southern demagogue, Bill Clinton calculated that no black man can compete with a white woman's tears, a left over from Old South thinking. Black men have been lynched as a result of the tears of white women. While Jesse Helms, another southern demagogue, used a black man's hand in an ad that criticized Affirmative Action, Feminist Bill Clinton, who exploited a young woman, who held him in awe, and cost Al Gore an election, used his wife's tears, so desperate was he to achieve a third term and redeem his being impeached. But judging from angry black callers into C-Span's "The Washington Journal," the day after the New Hampshire primary, and the following day, and my own non-scientific survey, many blacks finally get it. That they have been snookered by the Clintons. One angry man said that blacks supported Clinton during his marital problems and this is what they get for it. Another man said that he was going to vote for McCain as a way of protesting the Clinton's treatment of Obama. On Jan.11, an irate black woman called in and said that she had been devoted to the Clinton's since the 1990s, but after his attack on Obama, which she likened to " a knife in my chest," and which she described as "low down" she said that if Hillary were nominated, she'd either "vote Republican, or stay home." Calling into the Journal on Jan.13, a black woman from Ohio said that many of her friends were upset with the "subliminally racist" campaign against Obama that the Clinton's were conducting. These callers expressed the disgust that thousands of blacks feel about the Clintons dirty tricks campaign against Obama, which included sending out mailers making false statements about his view about abortion, and deceptively attributing another mailer, critical of Obama, to John Edwards. This black backlash against the Clintons provides the Republican Party with a golden opportunity to recruit black voters for McCain, but I doubt whether they will seize upon it. After all, while Clinton might have an office in Harlem, McCain has a black daughter!

A black Ph.D. caller said that he found blacks in a barbershop to be more prescient than he. They said that once whites entered the voting booth, they'd vote for the white candidate no matter what they said to the pollster. Some commentators recalled treatment that Howard Gant and Tom Bradley received. Both were considered shoo-ins by pollsters for Senator from North Carolina and Governor of California because whites misled pollsters about how they really intended to vote.

Later in the day of Jan.8, Larry Sabato of The University of Virginia , appearing on The Chris Matthews Show, commented about a previous segment during which Dee Dee Meyers and Pat Buchanan opposed Michael Eric Dyson's argument that white racism was a factor in Obama's New Hampshire defeat. He said, "I think its very naïve, given American history, to automatically dismiss the racial voting theory before it's investigated. There is some evidence that race is one of several factors involved in this upset." Chris Matthews, who, apparently, has taken a new look at racism in the United States, after the Imus debacle, and a couple of other white commentators, including NBC News Political Director, Chuck Todd, agreed with this sentiment that race was a factor. But most white commentators agreed with Pat Buchanan, and Dee Dee Meyers, former Clinton press secretary, who said that the difference between the polling that showed Obama with a double digit lead and the actual outcome had nothing to with white voters telling pollsters one thing and voting the opposite. For people like Pat Buchanan, nothing has to do with race, unless he can use race to stir up votes in one of his campaigns.

Predictably, The New York Times also followed the line that the racial attitudes of whites had nothing to do with Obama's narrow defeat in New Hampshire, not surprising since the line of The New York Times, on the opinion page and elsewhere, is that we have entered a "post race" period.

Such is the rage of blacks against the Clintons after Iowa and New Hampshire that If Hillary Clinton is nominated, she will not be elected president. Obama and his "Joshua" generation will inherit a party that has lost its way. This would be a new development for the progressive movement since, from the abolitionists to the progressive movements of the 20th century, black progressives were the followers and not the leaders. When Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison got out of line, the progressives replaced them with another more obedient black spokesperson. After he broke with his progressive sponsors, Richard Wright was assaulted (The God That Failed by Koestler, Silone, Wright).

An uninformed Times Op-Ed writer, a CMD, said that Obama had gotten farther toward the nomination than any other black. Not true. When Jesse Jackson won the Michigan primary, there was an eruption of panic among the party elite. Ben Wattenberg and others were brought in to smear Jackson with the charge of Anti-Semitism and out of this emergency arose the white conservative wing of the party, The Democratic Leadership Council, whose founder, Al From, still brags about how he put black people in their place. Clinton was the DLC's candidate for president.

The reason for the 1960s rift between the Black Power people and the New Left was because when the black nationalists arrived at Freedom Summer, the northeastern liberals were giving orders, while the blacks were taking the risks. The black nationalists took control of the movement and dragged Stokely Carmichael, who was devoted to non-violence, kicking and screaming into their ranks, and into their philosophy of armed self-defense, according to Askia Toure, whom Mary Snow in her book, Freedom Summer, accuses of purging the Northern Liberals from SNCC. The progressive white women left SNCC, but not before borrowing the SNCC manifesto and using it as it their own, according to Snow. They changed the pronouns and this became the beginning of the modern feminist movement. The reason that much of the feminist movement's fire is aimed at the brothers is because some of these women went away mad (Going South by Debra L.Schultz). Based upon Stokely Carmichael's remark that the position of women in SNCC was "prone," they accused the black men in SNCC of misogyny. According to black women, who were members of SNCC, the white feminists, led by Casey Hayden, took Carmichael's comments out of context. Their views about their clashes with white feminism are printed in The Trouble Between Us by Winifred Breines, a book ignored by Mark Leibovich,writing in The New York Times,Jan.13. He repeated the charge about Carmichael made by white feminists without asking black feminists what they thought. Typical of a member of the Old Media, which takes its cues from those whom the patriarchy has appointed to lead the movement.

If Cynthia McKinney is nominated for president by the Green Party, a test for corporate feminists like Gloria Steinem, so concerned about the lack of opportunities for their black sisters, black voters will flock to McKinney by the thousands, which might tip the balance if the contest is close between Ms. Clinton and her Republican opponent. Others will leave the line for president on the ballot, blank. This rage against the Clintons will go unnoticed by the segregated old corporate media, which has more information about the landscape of Mars than trends in the Black, Asian-American and Hispanic communities. They rely upon their hand full of colored mind doubles, who tell them what they want to hear.

Modern day Indian scouts. When they're not available, all white panels instruct each other about who is a racist and who is not, how black people feel, how they are going to vote, continuing what some blacks regard as the white intellectual occupation of the black experience, an attitude that dates all the way back to a letter written by Martin Delaney to Frederick Douglass, 1863, in which he complained about the favorable treatment Douglass gave to Harriet Beecher Stowe's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, while ignoring his Blake, or the Huts of America, 1859. "She can not speak for us," he wrote.

Clinton will still receive some support from some black democratic loyalists, and celebrities although some of them are beginning to distance themselves from the couple after Iowa and New Hampshire smears against Obama, but a large number of black people, who helped elect Clinton, twice, will defect.

Representative James E. Clyburn, a black Congressman from South Carolina, told the New York Times (Jan.11, 2008) that "he may abandon his neutral stance in his state's primary, based in part on comments by Senator Hillary Rodman Clinton about President Lyndon B.Johnson and the Rev. Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr." He
and other blacks interpreted Hillary Clinton's remark about the two as implying that Johnson did more for the cause of Civil Rights than King, who, like Obama, made great speeches.

Also one wonders whether Henry Louis Gate's Jr., media appointed leader of the Talented Tenth (a phrase that W.E.B DuBois used to appoint the black elite as the true leaders of the Negro masses, an insult to grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hammer), will follow suit. While smearing a number of black male writers as misogynists, in the Times and elsewhere, when Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down, Gates, Jr. said. We will "go to the wall for this president."

Are the Clintons new in a south where husbands like George Wallace extended their power by getting their wives elected? Hardly. Take the Fergusons.

In Texas there was a couple called the Fergusons, affectionately called "Ma and Pa Ferguson."

Miriam Ferguson was a quiet, private person who preferred to stay home in her big house in Temple, Texas, and take care of her husband, raise her two daughters, and tend to her flower garden.

But in 1923 she was elected governor of Texas, the first woman governor elected in the United States.

Her husband, Jim Ferguson, served two terms as governor, but during his second term he was impeached, which meant he could not run again for public office. So Miriam agreed to run to clear his name and restore the family's honor.

She served two terms as governor: from 1925 to 1927 and from 1933 to 1935. She and her husband became known as 'Ma' and 'Pa' Ferguson. Her campaign slogan was, 'Two Governors for the Price of One'.

Remind you of anyone?

Ishmael Reed is a poet, novelist and essayist who lives in Oakland. His widely-accalimed novels include, Mumbo Jumbo, the Freelance Pallbearers and the Last Days of Louisiana Red. He has recently published a fantastic book on Oakland: Blues City: a Walk in Oakland and Carroll and Graf has recently published a thick volume of his poems: New and Collected Poems: 1964-2006.

He is also the editor of the online zine Konch.

Obama (part 33 and a third)

2008-01-14T14:43:00.000-08:00

Jelani Cobb wrote an interesting article about how Obama relates to the old guard civil rights/race leaders (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.):

The most amazing thing about the 2008 presidential race is not that a black man is a bona fide contender, but the lukewarm response he has received from the luminaries whose sacrifices made this run possible. With the notable exception of Joseph Lowry, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference veteran who gave a stirring invocation at Obama's Atlanta campaign rally in June and subsequently endorsed him, Obama has been running without much support from many of the most recognizable black figures in the political landscape.

That's because, positioned as he is between the black boomers and the hip-hop generation, Obama is indebted, but not beholden, to the civil rights gerontocracy. A successful Obama candidacy would simultaneously represent a huge leap forward for black America and the death knell for the reign of the civil rights-era leadership -- or at least the illusion of their influence.

This, of course, takes us back to the often talked-about issue of black leadership: whether it exists (no), and perhaps more importantly, whether it can effectively exist (at least in the old school "race man" sense of the term) in the realm of national electoral politics. Obama raising a black fist and spitting hot fire about race would make him immediately NOT viable as a candidate. He would about as electable as John Edwards and all of his populist, anti-corporation talk. Actually, he would probably be less electable. Yikes.

Anyway, this blog entry, by Allison Klkenny, is also worth a read. Among the things it talks about is why white people are into Obama:

Instead of speaking for the black community, he generally ignores them, which has fueled his popularity among moderate Democrats. By remaining middle-of-the-road, Obama presents himself as a non-threatening "presidential" fellow.

White people love Obama because he's not interested in rehashing the past. He's a quick-fix solution to racial tension. No need for white guilt. No need for reparations. Whether he has the right to or not, Obama offers a collective "No sweat, man" to the part of America that still remembers the Rodney King trial or the little Jena Six incident. That's how he's able to gush about uniting the country and being the bridge between blue states and red states as though nationalism was a valid way to unite people with very little in common.

Also addressed is my pet issue of race and presumption of progressive politics:

Under careful scrutiny, it becomes clear that Obama is hardly proposing a concrete progressive agenda. Look past his pretty words and frothing-at-the-mouth supporters, and you get the same pretty rhetoric and vague promises presented to us by the other Democratic nominees.

Obama said he wanted to cut the lobbyists out of Washington, but the Catch-22 is that he needs those lobbyists to GET to the White House. Then he said he wanted Universal Health coverage, and yet he's bringing the big insurance companies to the table, as though the insurance companies will be the ones to propose they cut themselves out of the privatized health industry action.

Right now, it's unclear if Obama will bring any real change to the Democratic party. The only thing anyone really knows is that he's young, good-looking, one hell of a writer, charismatic, and has pumped some real life into a movement that is part grassroots and part corporate in nature.

So why does everyone so easily assume he's the candidate of change and a really exciting progressive? Well, he's articulate, charismatic, and black.

And this effectively sums up how I'm feeling about my support for Obama:

Perhaps there is a method behind his vagueness. Obama may long to lay low and avoid divisive issues like race just long enough to get elected, and then he'll become a champion of the disenfranchised minorities in this country. I buy into this campaign of hope because he appears genuine, but I think his supporters must lean on him throughout this election process.

A genuine man like Obama is kept honest by those people surrounding him. If we can get to him before the special interest groups, if we can keep him from being perverted by the sickness in D.C., there still yet may be hope to save the country. And if not - fuck it - at least you can tell your grandkids that you voted for a black guy.

Commodities, Logos, Labels: Hank Willis Thomas

2008-01-13T09:59:00.000-08:00

Part of my thinking more about Willis Thomas' work issues from coming to terms with myself as a consumer. I guess I've tended to think of myself as immune to consumerism, somehow holding up the fact that I've never owned or purchased a pair of Nikes as my badge of honor. Silly. Almost frighteningly, I've become quite the clothes-whore lately (t-shirts, shoes, bags, jackets) and I've always been a rather obsessive buyer of books. Willis Thomas' work reminds me of the skit that precedes the song "Good Clothes" on Little Brother's album Getback. Using the template of the well-known Mastercard ads, the voiceover says:

"Prada jeans: 300 dollars.

Gucci slippers: 500 dollars.

Spendin all your money to make these white folks rich: Priceless."

A critique of black consumerism and the advertisements that fuel it couched in the terms of advertising itself. This is the basic formula of Willis Thomas' work. His images are arresting and unlike many artists he speaks intelligently about what he produces. Definitely check out his stuff.

More Obama Thoughts

2008-01-13T09:50:00.000-08:00

So, okay, I'll admit that I've gotten caught up in Obama's message of hope, and can, as of this moment, consider myself an Obama supporter. But articles like this one, by Max Fraser, always help me to keep in mind some of the issues I've blogged about before regarding hope and race and (progressive) politics. Here is a relevant passage:

Shockingly little attention has been paid to the mortgage crisis on the campaign trail. The collapse of the housing market, and with it much of the equity ordinary Americans have built up since the 1990s, combined with soaring gasoline prices, a flat-lining dollar and the worst unemployment figures in two years, all suggest that the country is speeding toward its most serious recession in some time. "The subprime crisis is sinking America's economic boat like the Titanic," Jackson warned. "But if you're having a debate and nobody brings up mortgage foreclosures or predatory lending, then the issue just isn't part of the discussion."

Though Jackson endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in early 2007, his support has not been unequivocal. He has done little actual campaigning and even publicly criticized Obama for remaining silent on the Jim Crow justice meted out to six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times this past November, Jackson charged "the Democratic candidates--with the exception of John Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and has made addressing poverty central to his campaign--have virtually ignored the plight of African Americans in this country."

Just days after Obama handily won the Iowa caucus, his name was again conspicuously absent from all the discussion of the economic crisis confronting black Americans. Far more often the panelists referred to the symbolic meaning behind his candidacy rather than to Obama's public statements on the mortgage crisis (few and far between), his Congressional voting record on related issues like bankruptcy reform (not good) or his platform for helping the millions at risk of losing their homes. Limited in scope and short on details, Obama's plan amounts to little more than a minor tax credit, financial literacy training and an unspecified fund to "help homeowners avoid foreclosures." (Hillary Clinton's plan is slightly different but no better.) "Hope and substance must go hand in hand," Jackson stressed to his audience.

If black America is indeed facing "catastrophic times," as Congresswoman Jackson-Lee put it, then the question of whether Obama best represents the interests of black Americans is a vital one. The "politics of hope" are a far cry from a complete and detailed policy agenda--a moratorium on home foreclosures, an overhaul of the bankruptcy code, massive federal investment in restructuring mortgage rates and bailing out defaulting homeowners and, as The Nation recently editorialized, "a re-regulation of the entire financial sector: the revival of usury laws, the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act and an end to the outrageous conflicts of interest that facilitated this debacle."

Such a platform would begin to attend to the subprime flameout and its consequences for working and middle-class communities--black and otherwise--around the country. Access to quality jobs, education, healthcare and a solution to the mass incarceration of young black men--all of these would help remove the "badges and incidents" of the structural inequality that still plague black Americans. As the deepening mortgage crisis has demonstrated, black Americans need a President committed to structural change, not simply the promise of a new era of good feelings. Whether or not they get one this November will determine whether the current optimism about the Democratic field is well founded.

EDIT: I just saw this item, which basically explains that Obama's more vague economic message and his support from more well-to-do members of the Democratic party make him the "wine-track" candidate.

Daniel Day-Lewis is some kind of mutant monster actor

2008-01-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

His performance in There Will Be Blood? Wow, just, wow. (That's not even to mention the amazing score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and the portrayal of Eli Sunday by Paul Dano.) After reading yet another review, I may have to go see the film again. The string of really excellent movies I've seen recently (TWBB, No Country for Old Men, Juno) is truly agitating my urge to tell stories. Of course, it's also time for school to start again, so my creative work will be stunted. But I plan to at least use this last week before Spring 2008 to make some headway into the new novel I've been contemplating since last year. As for the old one? I need to follow up with folks in my efforts to get it publishable and published.

My new, perhaps tragic, love affair with hats

2008-01-09T08:25:00.001-08:00

Tragic because my head/hair (mostly hair) combo seems to make the wearing of fly hats impossible.

I'm posting a few pics. Look how fly these hats are!

I've been giving semi serious thought to cutting my hair to accommodate the dopeness. Check out Still Life to peep other choices. The folks over there are gonna try an experimental big head/hair hat for me to try. I have my fingers crossed.

the democratic convention (freestyle)

2008-01-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

please, sir, spare some

change.

or you, madam, any

change?

i take pennies

though dimes are nicer.

oh yes, i know.

next time.

not today.

change

is gonna come,

you say,

but it sounds better sung.

will you sing

if i help you

find your voice?

here it is,

your voice,

thin but solid,

copper and crisp,

plucked like a coin from my cup.

take it,

it's yours.

tomorrow then perhaps?

next time you see me?

(on a day without haste?)

some change to spare?

some change?

Clinton finishes 3rd in Iowa!

2008-01-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

Would an elected Obama be assassinated? (aka "They Gon Kill 'Im")

2008-01-03T11:48:00.001-08:00

One thing I hear a lot from black folks (mostly) is that if Barack Obama is elected president "they gonna kill his ass." There's no explicit reason given and there's no need for one to be given. It's understood. The elusive but ever-present "they" (a spook I fully believe in) would kill his ass because of his race. I disagree.

In an article I already linked, the following appears:

At the big rally in Columbia, Oprah notched up her Obama-as-savior rhetoric by referencing a scene in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "I remember Miss Pittman, her body all worn and withered and bent over. As she would approach the children, she would say to each one, 'Are you the one? Are you the one?'" Oprah didn't mention that Miss Pittman was looking for a black messiah. She didn't have to. "I watched that movie many years ago, but I do believe today I have the answer to Miss Pittman's question. It's a question that the entire nation is asking. Is he the one?" Tentative cheers. "Is he the one?" Big cheers. "South Carolina," Oprah proclaimed, "I do believe he's the one."

When Efia Nwangaza heard that, she could only wonder: "He's the one for who, and what?" Nwangaza, a longtime activist and onetime Green Party US Senate candidate, is among the many black (and white) progressives left cold by the symbolic standoff between Clinton and Obama. But it didn't stop her from driving from Greenville to witness the Sunday spectacle. "I had mixed feelings," she told me afterward. "I was really moved by it. By the yearning of the people who were there to have someone representing them and their interests. I understand the yearning, in that I am also tired. Having been a civil rights-cum-human rights activist all my life, having had movement parents, I would be so relieved to know that there is a fruitful end to those efforts, and that some candidate embodied it. But I don't think that's what's happening with Barack Obama."

Or Hillary Clinton. "When I look at what both Obama and Clinton say, and what they do, they are not it. They are both chameleons. They are both opportunistic. They both come from the overcompensatory 'being first' frame of reference. Which means that they will be more white male than any white male, including George W. Bush, would ever be. My feeling is that people across the board are being sold a bill of goods."

Kevin Alexander Gray, who's working on a book called The Decline of American Politics, From Malcolm X to Barack Obama, seconded the point. "People say they're voting for Obama because they want a change. A change to what? This is people thinking that the cosmetic is more important than the structural. Obama is a candidate who happens to be black. That's his prerogative, and it's fine. But it's not what we need. Obama's campaign is not a movement. It is someone running for office."

What is clear in this excerpt is a certain concern about how progressive our two "first ever" candidates (Obama and Clinton) are, a fear that they might "out-white male" the white males we've been used to. Paradoxically, it is suggested that race and gender are no guarantee of politics while at the same time politics-as-usual is described in raced (white) and gendered (male) terms.

Regardless, the first part of this paradox is a point well taken, and helps to explain why I think Obama's "race" is not the reason that he would, if elected, be in danger. If he gets in office and is "more white male than any white male," just another old establishment liberal, I suspect that he won't have too much to fear. Of course there is always the danger of the blatantly racist kook. I don't want to underestimate the deep-seated racism that persists in this country, but there are probably kooks who think about killing every elected president.

Based on what I've read and know so far, John Edwards is clearly more progressive than Obama (given the history of racial tropes, the irony of Obama calling Edwards "angry" shouldn't go unmentioned here). Then again, especially in light of the challenges Edwards, a white male, is facing because of his stance, it's a certainty that the U.S. is not ready for a person of color (or a woman, for that matter) who doesn't, to a large degree, follow the same old establishment line.

I think about when MLK was assassinated (at the peak of radicalism) and can't ignore the significant way that politics gets braided into issues of race. So the sad thing here is that Obama would probably have to seriously endanger himself in order to make substantive change. Tragically, his own safety (and Clinton's) would probably depend heavily on the maintenance of the status quo.

Midnight's Knack (freestyle)

2008-01-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

pennywise and precious

bowed in rainbows

bent, hue-drenched, and spent

hoarding trifles

pocket-size self

the flat head

the sad tale of another H.E.R.

coy and flip

tossing H.E.R. hair and laughing

with the dart of H.E.R. burlap tongue

and I

left untasted

untalked about

unwhetted

just nicked

merely tossed in the icy wind

of midnight

Obama and fatalism

2007-12-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

Can Obama win? Not the primary, but the general election? This seems to be the question that is motivating many voters, black voters at that, not to vote for him. There is a sense that there is no way he would win the Presidency, and that even if he did, he'd be killed soon after. For those who identify themselves as progressives, there is a more basic concern about Obama's politics, that both he and Hillary Clinton lead campaigns that don't qualify as movements for substantive change. For a fascinating look at these and related issues in South Carolina, see this article by Bob Moser.

Whoa! Denzel is playing MELVIN TOLSON?!?!

2007-12-31T08:32:00.000-08:00

This I gotta see. I knew (from my qualifying exam preparation) that the poet Melvin Tolson did work with an all-black debate team in the 30s. And I also knew that Denzel's new movie, The Great Debaters, was about an all-black debate team. (Duh!) But I had no clue, until I read this, an article about Obama and Oprah, by the incomparable Patricia Williams (the Mad Law Professor herself!), that The Great Debaters was about Tolson's team! I've heard the movie is pretty formulaic and had no interest in seeing it, but now I must go!

Thinking about China, economic growth, sustainability, Pakistan, Bhutto, where this world is heading, what we can do, etc.

2007-12-31T08:13:00.001-08:00

On China's rapid growth and sustainability issues, check these two articles, one from the New York Times, and the other from Mother Jones.

On Benazir Bhutto's assassination, check this and this from The Nation.

For a cool article on having hope, I would point you to another article from The Nation. Says Rebecca Solnit, "Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the walls for cracks--or building ladders--rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It's a world view, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again." Read on.

Social networking sites and privacy

2007-12-28T15:01:00.000-08:00

Be sure to check out this article, "On Facebook," in The Nation by Ari Melber. (I was just having a conversation a few weeks ago about the ways in which privacy has changed.)

Among the many interesting, even startling, things in the article is the the idea that with the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, a new concept of privacy has come into effect. This "new privacy" is not about controlling if anybody knows, but controlling how many people know.

Apparently, most of Facebook's 58 million active users don't make of the privacy settings. Four out of five users simple accept the default settings, which allows their whole network, which can be larger than that a major tabloid's circulation, to see their entire profile.

Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that the 2.7 billion photographs currently posted on the site (with over 2.2 billion digital labels of people in the photos) are the property of Facebook! "In fact," Melber writes, "everything that people post is automatically licensed to Facebook for its perpetual and transferable use, distribution or public display. The terms of use reserve the right to grant and sublicense all 'user content' posted on the site to other businesses."

I could go on, but read it. In addition to suggesting that users make use of the privacy settings, Melber offers tangible legislative ways to tackle these issues.

I want to think more about how social networking sites fit into Samuel Delany's concept of "networking" vs. "contact" as modalities of social interaction. (See his book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.) Delany advocates contact (unplanned, random, serendipitous encounters such as would happen on urban streets) as a form of interaction more productive and valuable than networking's structured web of connections. His argument is part of a larger concern he has with urban renewal projects (such as the one in Times Square) that threaten to eliminate possibilities of contact and leave us only with the sterility of networking.

I may post more about this another time, but suffice to say for now that Delany is brilliant. Read him.

Kwanzaa

2007-12-27T15:04:00.000-08:00

Tayari Jones linked this over at her blog and it made me a little angry. What I'm referring to is Debra J. Dickerson's article about Kwanzaa. What gets me is Dickerson's insistence that black history begins with slavery. See lines like "it pains me that we need to look outside our American experience for spiritual and cultural sustenance," and check references to "our ancestors" that oddly limit their brave or admirable acts to those conducted within the U.S. national borders. Her breezy dismissal of Africa on the grounds that it "is a continent, not a nation" and thus too diverse to deal with is as inane as the references in the worst forms of Afrocentrism. Both find ways to erase the complexity and importance of Africa.

I'm not even a Kwanzaa person, but I will certainly defend Kwanzaa against critiques that lack an understanding of black history as one that is not circumscribed by the United States. Blacks from all over the world, including the US, have always looked outside of their national circumstance to sustain themselves, construct identities, and forge cultural and political alliances.

I suppose I should be surprised though. Dickerson is the same person who argued that Barack Obama is not black "because he had no part in our racial history." (Again, note how "our racial history" is always only a national history that finds its origins in slavery). Ah, how maddening is this world when Barack Obama isn't black but Bill Clinton is. (Toni Morrison's statements about Clinton were argued in a more sophisticated "he has the tropes of blackness" way, so I'm not at all putting her comments on the same plane at Dickerson's. In fact, Morrison's statement that "white skin notwithstanding, [Clinton] is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," is prophetic.)

Speechless

2007-12-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

I have no words for this yet. Be forewarned that it's loud and has provocative imagery. I wonder what Carolyn Cooper would have to say about it. I need to read her stuff.

Ass Activism

2007-12-27T12:11:00.000-08:00

I invite you to check this out for what, in my humble opinion, is retarded. The Venus Revolution is described in the site's media kit as "a first of its kind, multi-media exhibit series displaying voluptuous, 'full-figured' women with amazing adornments," and invitation to "an alternative standard," and "way to challenge current dominant standards of beauty." Arooo? (c) Scooby-Doo

Based on what I saw in the trailer, I can't fathom how this project (or the film portion of it at the very least) effectively does any of the above. First, of course, is a question of audience. Who is this film/exhibition series targeting? It would seem to be that the "alternative standard" that is being propped up here does just fine in the alternative context from which it comes. And I can't fathom that the audience for this is a mainstream one.

Then I'm not sure how different this is from magazines or music videos that feature full-figured or large bottomed women. The veneer of history and politics here is laughable. And, not to be essentialist, but I have sincere doubts about how well any man could pull of a project like this. Not that a woman couldn't and wouldn't find a way to screw it up too, but geez.

Sorry, brother Hotep, sorry Skinnymen Productions, I like curves as much as the next guy and I hope women of all shapes and sizes feel good about themselves, but this project is, at best, a poorly thought-out failure and, at worst, an excuse to ogle some ass. I'm sure it will result in some fun parties down in ATL, but there's nothing revolutionary about this. This is like when guys get up at poetry readings and spit some derivatively cadenced junk about a "black pearl" (read: clitoris) and somehow get lauded as womanist when all they really want is some panties thrown at them (which they get often enough, for some reason). I can't help but be reminded of Dewie Obabababaoooooo Mamasaymamasahmamacoosah (Jenkins), his standards for being a revolutionary, and his revolutionary poetry.

Saartjie Baartman is probably not a happy ancestor right now. Salami, eggs, and bacon!

My wacky aunt (Xmas relatives post)

2007-12-25T19:00:00.000-08:00

This will be brief. I'm sure we all have that crazy relative who always does something out the box during family gatherings. Mine is my aunt. From New Jersey. Today she greeted me with a hug and a smack on the ass.

Then, a bit later, after I came from outside (where I was taking pictures of my mom's holiday decorating/lightshow masterpiece), she yelled out, "He was probably outside smoking weed!" Wooooooow.

A few years ago, I brought my then-girlfriend home and within earshot of my then-boo, my auntie says, "She has a NICE ASS! I'm sure YOU (meaning me) know that as well anyone huh?!"

I shall now sign off and raise my glass of cabernet and toast the brilliant lunacy of my aunt. Cheers.

Albums you should never ever ever ever play to set a romantic mood

2007-12-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

Ok, so my list actually only consists of one album: Meshell Ndegeocello's BITTER. The incident I have in mind took place YEARS ago, but I was reminded of it because I saw Meshell (a WONDERFUL artist) perform at a little Brooklyn spot recently and she did a song from BITTER (released in 1999).

Let me first make clear that I did not intend to woo with BITTER. I had a system with a 3-CD changer at the time and the album was in there along with my chosen background-to-honeylipping music (don't remember what it was, probably something good and Love Jones-y. Yep. Corny). Anyway, things were proceeding nicely, but then, then. BITTER.

Let me digress a bit in order to explain the power of BITTER. In this interesting book called Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art, the author, Greg Downey, has a section where he writes about how capoeiristas (capoeira players) learn to develop an acute awareness of the body's vulnerability. We (yes, I am a capoeirista) use the words aberto (open) and fechado (closed) to refer to status of the body during a capoeira jogo (game). If you're open, you're susceptible to attack; if you're closed, you're safe (always only "for the time being," since no defensive posture remains secure). So, to sum up, in capoeira there is a peculiar notion of bodily space as always vulnerable and of the body itself as porous.

This porousness is precisely what BITTER seems engineered to assault, gently but relentlessly. If you've never heard BITTER, then I'm not sure how best to explain this to you. The words often used to describe it ("spare" and "moody") don't begin to explain how excruciatingly, achingly beautifully sad this album is. Those who have heard this album know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Its workings on a person are so subtle, seeping into your every physical, mental, and emotional opening, but the effects can be rather dramatic, as was demonstrated when my young lady friend suddenly burst into tears (remember: things were proceeding nicely) and couldn't explain why! Then I noticed that I too was sad (and not because things were no longer proceeding nicely). This album makes everything connected to love, relationships, sex seem infinitely more complicated, darkly shaded with complexity. The discrete compartments of our selves become flooded, and we are shocked by the proximity and connectedness of what we, in our daily pursuits, try to keep apart. BITTER is detox tea for the soul, an A-plus album in my opinion, but not the stuff you want for your everyday romance. It challenges you to widen the emotional range of your typical romantic encounter. Sweet (the album's absent presence) tempered with bitter, resulting in a more expansive palate. But if you and your boo ain't ready, don't go there!

OK, so this is my first day of blogging and this is my 4th post already! I may revisit this album concept, but I'm gonna stop now because it's time to head to my mom's place for a few (holi)days, an experience that I'm sure will generate more dangerously vagrant thoughts.

Fictional Meditation on Black Love

2007-12-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

Interesting, said Priest. He was peering transfixed at the items listed on the flimsy paper menu he held in his hands.
After a while Kincaid said, What?
I mean, I’m all for healthy eating, man, but what is this? said Priest. Un-sausage? Tofurky? Soy ham and wheggs? What’s a whegg?
Eggs made with wheat gluten.
Of course...
It’s all vegan, Priest. Give it a try. I think you’ll like it.
I think, he replied, that this is an insult to brunch. Brunch, my friend, is by its very nature the heartiest of meals. It has to be substantial, with beans and meat and eggs. Real ones. Wheggs? Brunch is not the time for imaginary food.
Quit whining, old man. Hypertension beckons you. Those rusted pipes of yours will appreciate an infusion of the good.
The good? Listen to your pompous ass. Shit, if this is the good, I may have to rethink my allegiances.
Quit it, man. Just order something.
The waitress, a bright-faced young woman with skin the color of a fading ermine, walked slowly over to their table. She was wearing flawless vintage sneakers and bluejeans made vivid by the shape of her hips. She smiled appreciatively as she approached, and her jeans accrued dimensions.
Kincaid stood to greet her, and they exchanged kisses on the cheek.
She said, Peace. How’re you, sweetie?
Can’t complain, said Kincaid, regaining his seat. Simone, I want you to meet my friend Priest.
Greetings, she said, shaking his hand.
A pleasure.
As Simone took Kincaid’s order (soy ham and wheggs with un-sausage links, papaya juice, a glass of almond milk), Priest, scratching his cheek stubble, tugging his goatee’s weedy growth, peered at the warped image of Bob Marley’s face on her tee, broadly grinning or grimacing, stretched out like a wind-tortured ghost across her mammoth chest. The words KINKY REGGAE encircled the face. Indeed.
And for you? Simone repeated.
Oh, um, let’s see, let’s see. It all looks so good. Heh. What the heck, I’ll have the seven grain pancakes … made with vanilla soy and coconut milk! I see… And does that come with syrup? Blackstrap molasses. I see. So, yeah, that and a side order of scrambled wheggs, a fresh fruit cup, aaaaaaaannnnd a peppermint tea if you will.
A blesséd choice, she said. And then, meeting his gaze, holding it: You’ve got a great eye for yummy things. We’ll be right back with your tea.
The men watched her lazy feline retreat with a snowfall’s rage. Light and piecemeal, heavy in silence.
We? said Priest.
Yeah, we. Simone contains various multitudes. Mind, body, and soul. Ancestor, self, and unborn child. Consciousness, subconsciousness, unconsciousness. Masculine and feminine. And so on and so forth. She’s real serious about there being no I. So she, or they, refers to herself, or themselves, as we.
Priest rubbed his eye. You Brooklyn Negroes’re somethin else. We? Greetings? Blesséd? Jee-sus. It’s like you lobotomize and castrate yourselves to figure out what being black is.
You seemed pretty impressed with her.
No no no, young blood. Women impress me. Real women. Your friend is a caricature. A cartoon.
Oh c’mon man. It’s harmless. She’s positive. She’s all about love. Love: that’s your thing, right?
Priest looked around the restaurant. It wasn’t terribly crowded but more people came by the minute. There were a few white people—the pilgrims of gentrification—and one Japanese woman wearing a headwrap and cowrie shell earrings, but everyone else, including the Japanese woman’s companion, was black and young and beautiful. Crocheted hats and kufis and headwraps and bright tams peacocked the place. Everyone’s hair was covered or locked or twisted or left untamed. Their heads made a map of someplace green and imagined, golden with earth and laved with jade water. They were indistinguishable from the images of muscular regal men and gorgeous wise women hanging on the walls. Such a pair engaged in clean, dramatic acts of lovemaking or holding between them a preternaturally serene child. Interspersed with these were vivid photographs of flowers and produce—tomatillos and nectarines delightfully juxtaposed, unpeeled carrots bunched in their orange glory, a single strawberry wet like a lollipopped tongue. Above their table there was a photo of a poinsettia, fully flush, master of its crimson enticements. Nearby there were announcements about poetry readings, a schedule for the local farmers’ market, and framed quotations from Exodus and the book of Psalms.
Love. Yeah, that’s my thing. But this here is puppydog love, not human love. Positive without a doubt, but there’s something real fake about this, man. Or delusional.
I think it’s charming in a way. There’s something childlike in it that I think we need. Maybe it is delusional, but it’s also innocent. We’ve been made to feel guilty for so long. A little innocence is refreshing.
That’s just it though. I’m not sure how innocent it is. It’s willful, romantic—
Simone returned with a cup and a steaming teapot. Before she left she said, Let that steep for a few minutes if you want to get all the medicinal properties.
—and contrived, Priest said, speaking in a whisper. Naively so, especially in light of everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve learned. Why reinvent the wheel?
But, look, as long as shit is still fucked up, which it is, and as long as being black is seen as something valuable and worth exploring—
There is no exploration! Where is the exploration?
If the ship is on fire, leaky, and the sails are full of holes, there’s only so far you can explore. I can’t come down too hard on positiveness and love because the impulse behind those things tells me that my people want to be free and that they dream healthy dreams about themselves and that they can imagine a different way to live, a better future. That may be corny, but it’s sincere and it gives me hope.
That gives you hope? Well, it scares me, man, it really does. It scares me when my people have to make themselves and their love feeble. When love is reduced to nothing but an impulse to be positive. Love is my thing, without a doubt, without a doubt. But black people have to learn how to love robustly. Enough of this Om Shanthi blesséd are we Black is Beautiful shit. It’s escapist, plain and simple. And any love predicated on being positive and escapist is feeble, it’ll lead us to delude and ultimately defeat ourselves. And that, my friend, is not by any stretch of the imagination harmless.
I hear contempt in your voice, old man. I do. It’s the same contempt I hear in the words of these Negroes-from-on-high—usually literature professors or museum curators—who babble dismissively on between bites of quiche and fancy hors d’oeurves about the need for complexity and irony and whatever else the weak minds of the masses can’t seem to get a grip on. I’m real suspicious of that, real suspicious, because from a place of comfort it denies the reality that some people aren’t happy, that they still need to affirm themselves, that they’ve yet to find bliss and therefore they have to invent it.
At this, Priest nearly snorted out his mouthful of tea. Don’t try to bring class into this. This isn’t about the masses. Have you ever heard of the blues? The masses are better equipped than anyone to see the marvelous and surreal and complex ironies of life. If anything, he said, leaning towards Kincaid, it’s people like your buxom friend over there who dismiss the masses. That’s where you’ll find your contempt.
They’re dismissing the absurd circumstances that people are forced to live in, not the people themselves. There’s contempt for this ridiculous country and this ridiculous world we live in. If we can’t admire that, then we’re lost. If we can’t admire a genuine desire to escape the everyday bullshit we’re constantly exposed to, to surround yourself or your people with positive forces and beauty, to embrace freedom and love—
There you go again. Love. What is this bastard version of love you keep talking about? I don’t recognize it. The love I know is not pure or pretty. It’s not spirituality in a bottle, myrrh-scented. It’s not cowardly, it doesn’t run from the problems of the world. The love I know tells the truth.
That’s the love you know, man. Everybody knows love differently, each person can only love the way they know how.
That’s too easy, Kincaid. We can’t just say everybody knows love and everybody is different, and then just leave it at that. We can’t afford to. We can’t. You know why? Cause we are systematically taught how not to love, we are taught to be desolate and despairing and unethical. People don’t know how to love, man, they don’t. And if they do, then everyday of their waking lives there’s something gently or not so gently slapping that knowledge out of them.
Priest was trembling now, breathing heavily. His hands, curled into fists, also trembled. Kincaid watched them and he was suddenly, inexplicably, afraid. He noted, as if for the first time, the sharpness of forks and knives.
Simone brought their food. She smiled at Priest and rubbed Kincaid’s shoulder. Eat up, my black men, she said. And then, leaning over, in a whisper: We need you to be strong.
They ate in silence for a few moments. Kincaid stared at the bright yellow walls from time to time and found some solace there. Then he spoke:
So are you gonna teach them, Priest? Are you gonna teach our people how to love?
Priest stabbed a wedge of whegg with his fork and then a stacked section of pancake. He shoved the food into his mouth and chewed slowly, with all the power of his jaw. When he was done, he grinned a little and said, That’s all I’ve ever done, young blood. That’s why I get out of bed in the morning. That’s what I dream about at night. That, he said after a moment, is the purpose of everything I do. Do you hear the way that word slams against the air? Purpose. That’s the key, and those who are questing lazily for their blackness don’t have it.
Kincaid looked away from Priest, weary of this conversation. He surveyed the restaurant, he looked at the faces of the beautiful men and women. There was also a small child, a girl, brightly clothed and at the moment very happy. She danced and sang next to a table in the charmingly untidy way of children. The couple sitting at the table laughed and sang along with her. Everyone here was kind and jovial, open to speak with and enjoy one another in a way foreign to this city. And for this, for bringing Priest here, Kincaid was being made to feel guilty? For this?
Let me tell you something, Priest said.
Kincaid regarded him coldly, with cold dark eyes.
Blackness is this and this only: our various ways of being human in the world. That’s it, man. That’s all it is. Plain and simple. But if we can’t love, robustly and honestly, then we’re not really human, and then blackness becomes some species of monster. It becomes outsize, a source of shame or an addiction, the idea of it looms larger than life, becomes more important than life, than living and being free. Talking about it becomes impossible, nonsensical, gobbledygook. I’m sure you’ve had those conversations before: black is this, but not that, stupid shit like that. Damn that. Let’s just learn how to love so we can just be. So we can get free. Yeah, man, I’m gonna teach us how to love, I’m gonna help us remember. You damn right. I’m gonna do my part.
Well, Kincaid said in a low weary voice, you remember this. Teachers can be cruel. They lie, they deceive, despite or maybe because of their best intentions. And love can be cruel too. It leads us to ourselves and to others, but as we take shape, we bend and lie and deceive, compromise ourselves and other people. All for the sake of love. And is it worth it? Who knows? I suspect that the honest answer is yes, but only sometimes. So be careful, Priest. Be careful. I’m learning everyday that this love stuff is sordid business.

The Tall Get All the Chicks

2007-12-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Empire State Building looks closer
today, as if, bored, he had cinched up
his pleated, boxy skirts and taken a few sneaky steps.
Oddly, no one heard! In the New York dust
no one noticed his dust. In the New York
commotion no one noticed his motion.
In New York, hot dogs, traffic, and mustard
distract from Empire’s bluster. Who
knew that here the Empire State Building
was light-footed? My watch ticks and I watch
his tactics, the brilliance of his lights blasting
on, as though doffing his dunce cap and winking.
Nearby, a few women, tourists no doubt, titter
and all in a tizzy they fumble with their cameras,
looking to catch snapshots of the man of their dreams.
I am jealous of you, Empire State Building! I am
short and fat and too cowardly to wear a long skirt!
Your brilliant beard trumps my deficiency of beard!
And no one, absolutely no one, cares when I move!
Sniffing the persistent pizza, pretzeling my arms
in consternation, I see the women shiver with delight,
take snapshot after snapshot, and then it hits me.
The proverbial lightbulb flickers forth, I grab and wag
it at 31st Street (where the Empire State Building now
resides), a glowworm shaking its fist at the sun:
Empire State Building, I’ll be your doppelgänger!
Now, I think, where to be stubbornly, majestically
still? The best places are always taken. I pluck
my bulb until it flickers forth again, and it is clear
as day: Times Square! Where else to be still
and majestic against the city’s interminable lean?
On the subway, I practice being still, and I discover it
means being mean and confident and wretched. I love it.
Once in Times Square, I select a spot and assume
my posture: knees slightly bent, shoulders back.
My hair is combed over and groomed. A porn shop
is in front of me. If only I had a codpiece. Yes,
Empire State Building, codpiece trumps skirt!
So I stand and stand, still and still, and think
about appropriate things: How silly and in a rush
everyone is. The will of monks. Plumbing!
Oh shit! Oh piss! I have no convenient system
of pipes to drain me! I’ll never be still! Empire
State Building, I hate you! In New York, the tall
get all the chicks. The rest of us must buy roses.

The Ego of Objects

2007-12-24T07:21:00.000-08:00

Renoir once said,
I paint
With my prick.
For a poet of the body
Everything conspires
To shatter and corrupt:
Holes in wicker chairs
And bottle openers,
The heat from every
Lamp and television
In sight. Sitting
Becomes an act of whores.
That and licking
The flab of ice cream
Sandwiches.
A tower is a penis
And a cola bottle is
And a toilet paper tube is
And a rolled up Sunday
Paper to spank the dog
Is a penis too. And
The shapes of the world
Quiver with copulation.
A poet of the soul crumbles
The ego of objects,
Blows centrifugal dust,
And discovers the conjugal
Amphitheater
Of the world’s skin
And its purple unblinking
Eyes and leafless winter lashes.
The soul poet hears the broad belly
Hunger of the earthquaked earth
And gives up his cakes
And toast and jelly. A totemic
Thirst, the dry and cavernous
Tortoise throat of the desert
Coughs, spitting ash, and drop
By drop the soul poet
Empties his calabash.
The things of the world
Are dying, slumped and slouching
In haste towards breathless grace.
Only the lover, the soul
Poet, at dusk returns
The moon’s sunlit torso.