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Barack and Michelle Obama went on the Today Show this morning to perform some serious damage control following Monday’s performance by Reverend Jeremiah Wright before the National Press Club. Indeed, to be fair, we should view both television appearances as performances, one by Wright, the other by the Obamas, in a larger drama playing out several conflicts at once: between two generations of African Americans, between two strains of political philosophy on the American Left, and between Black political actors and the American media over how to define the image of political participation by African Americans. As an example of the latter, consider Maureen Dowd’s snarky portrayal of Obama as the Sort of Angry Black Man and Wright as the Really Angry Black Man. (Cripes, is she annoying.)

That is by no means an exhaustive list. For example, I have not mentioned Michele’s role as supportive wife, and the balancing act she has to perform as providing “strength” as his advocate while “softening” her husband’s image via her very presence. Better minds than mine can explore the implications of this role for women in political life, and Black women, especially in the context of this conflict over the image of Black political participation.

What strikes me is the relevance of a theory I recently came across in a new book written by communication and anthropology professor John L. Jackson, Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. Don’t let that subtitle fool you; I think it was an editor’s choice, because Jackson is not ranting about the “excesses” of “P.C. culture” like some Limbaugh boor. Rather, he puts forward a rather thoughtful thesis:

Racism is characterized by hatred and power: the hate people express for other racial groups and the relative power they possess to turn that hatred into palpable discrimination or material advantage. The concept of racial paranoia, however, stresses the fears I’ve been talking about, the fears people harbor about other groups potentially hating or mistreating them, gaining a leg up at their expense. Racial paranoia is racism’s flipside, even if those two analytically discrete sides can sometimes effortlessly meet. (p. 4, Introduction).

Examples Jackson cites in the Preface and Introduction are Dave Chappelle’s perception that one of the crew member’s on his show was laughing inappropriately at his use of black face; and the Reverend Louis Farrakhan’s promotion of a theory that the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers had deliberately dynamited the dams near black neighborhoods in New Orleans to spare white neighborhoods from the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. I thought especially of the latter when I read that Wright in his press conference had repeated the old theory that the C.I.A. had brewed the HIV virus and tested it on vulnerable populations, including poor working class people of color. Such assertions put Obama and any other Black politician attempting to appeal to “mainstream white voters” on the defensive. Indeed, much of Obama’s reluctance to distance himself from Wright stems not only from his personal relationship, but also from the differences in perception that Jackson identifies among Blacks and Whites regarding events that disproportionately affect the Black community, such as the spread of AIDS and Hurricane Katrina. Regarding the latter, Jackson relates an appearance by Chuck D. on Tucker Carlson’s thankfully now-kaput MSNBC show; typically, Carlson plays the Reasonable White Guy flabbergasted that anyone would believe Farrakhan’s theory and that Chuck D. - “a smart guy” in Carlson’s disingenuous words (p. 7) - would not immediately denounce it.

Carlson is a perfect example of America’s too-quick willingness to dismiss the significance of racial paranoia. Of course, such dismissal allows everyone to sleep better at night, believing that a few racial cranks say nothing meaningful about more general racial suspicions in American society, but we can’t begin to understand race today (or the volatile racial fault lines of contemporary national politics) without taking such beliefs (as wild as they may seem) quite seriously - not as points of fact but as organizing principles for how people make sense of their everyday lives and the forces potentially allied against them.

I have only begun to read this book, obviously from the source of my quotes, but I really appreciate Jackson’s approach. In calling such fears “paranoia” Jackson does not “mean that they’re not after you.” He doesn’t off-hand dismiss these fears, but sees them as rooted in a post-Civil Rights environment in which readily identifiable sources of discrimination such as Jim Crow laws have been largely eliminated, yet more subtle practices continue and social inequities along lines of racial and ethnic identity persist without a larger narrative to explain them. As such, the demand for Obama to completely renounce Wright - sever ties, hit him with a shovel and bury him in ditch, or whatever means would truly satisfy the Sean Hannities of the world - are inherently racist in nature, reflecting the institutionalized blindness Whites enjoy as a social privilege.

Tags: barackobama, reverend jeremiah wright, racism, racial paranoia, white privilege, john l. jackson

The editorial board of the Detroit Free Press could not come to a consensus opinion regarding the latest “controversy” (cough, distraction, cough) over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s relationship with Barack Obama. So they did a neat thing and published the thoughts of individual editorial board members. They’re pretty amusing, but I like Barb Arrigo’s best:

After enduring what is arguably the most faith-based presidential administration in history, why are we attacking the candidate who is most likely to ensure a strong separation of church and state? Or why are we not at least asking him (and the others) how much faith-based money the federal government should continue to hand out, and whether hearing the voice of God factors into their major decisions? From everything I’ve read about Obama, he takes the Constitution very seriously after teaching constitutional law. I think he’d steer us away from church-state entanglements, rather than into more of them, regardless of who his pastor is/was. In fact, if you’re a constitutionalist ala Ron Paul, I think Obama is your best bet among those left standing in the major party fray.

Tags: barackobama, jeremiah wright, church, state, presidential politics

I have nothing original to add to the discussion of the police murder of Sean Bell and the judge’s decision to let the guilty cops go free. Maybe because I’m too pissed off, or nauseated, or both by the loss of life, the criminal murder of an innocent man, the inherent racism of the police state, the loss to the man’s wife and young daughter and the rest of his family - I could go on. But others are writing more eloquently than I can muster today, so I link with approval to them.

Holly writes at Feministe that the police murder of black men is a feminist issue. She makes a strong, eloquent case.

The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

The SuperSpade is rightly flabbergasted and bitter:

I know there will be rallies held in New York to protest this miscarriage of justice and if you are in the area, you should go. After the marches though, Bell’s story like Amadou Diallo and others will be filed in the Black consciousness as the continuing saga of injustice that has plagued Black folk since we were kidnapped from Africa. Surely this is worth Black folk being bitter right?

Mikhael B. Reid expresses her outrage and posts links to cartoons she has done on this case and on police brutality.

I’ll post more when I find it.

Oh, And: Barack Obama registered the predictable “we are a nation of laws so don’t go crazy in the streets” admonishment. Not that I expected him (or think he should) advocate rioting, but it would be refreshing to hear a prominent politician say something like, “We are a nation of laws, sure, but I don’t see how the police can be allowed to gun down a person in cold blood and get away with it. Something is wrong with our justice system. Cases like this make the law seem like a sham to protect the power of the state against the rights - the very lives - of the people.”

UPDATE: The Village Voice reports that the Justice Department will begin investigating civil rights violations pertaining to this case. And that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to take measures that will build up public trust in the police department.

Curiously, Bloomberg announced that one of the ways they hoped to instill public trust in the NYPD was by bolstering the staff at the Civilian Complaint Review Board so that now “complaints are dealt with swiftly and efficiently.” What Bloomberg didn’t mention was that since bolster the CCRB last year the NYPD has “swiftly and efficiently” been dumping a record number of the agency’s substantiated cases.

Roberto Lovato analyzes the political implications of this case for Obama, although I could give a crap less. However, I agree with his conclusion:

Beyond Obama, all of us need to raise our voices and point at the abyss of our country’s institutional racism as was painfully and transparently reflected in today’s verdict. We might want to start by pushing Obama, Clinton and McCain — and the mainstream media — to speak honestly and continually about what the 50 bullets in Sean Bell say about justice in the 50 states of our tattered and bloodied union.

Man, if I were Hillary Clinton - currently riding high on a 10 point margin of victory in Pennsylvania - I would find a way to remove the tongue from my husband’s mouth. Because I (Hillary Clinton, that is) can’t really enjoy my hard-won win without Mr. Megaphone saying dumb crap like, say, accusing black Democrats of “playing the race card” on him and driving the black vote toward Barack Obama. Ya see, they totally took his comparison of Obama’s victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s the wrong way. He wasn’t making a racially charged, dismissive and douchebaggy comment; he was just answering a question. And, best of all, this was part of the Obama plan aaallll alooonngg!

Hat tip to Aisha Music.

UPDATE: Now The Master Equivocator is refusing to acknowledge he ever said anything about a “race card.” Dude, it’s on audio! WE CAN HEAR YOU! This is why the right wing thinks you’re on drugs, because you refuse to look reality in the face or take any responsibility for your words and actions. Man! That guy is a piece of work.

Click the image to see the full scale cartoon.

By now everyone is familiar with the idiotic questions ABCNooziz Georges Gibson and Stephanopoulos asked of both Senators Obama and Clinton during last week’s debate. But I focus on Stephanopoulos, because he seems to have a knack for asking Obama utterly moronic questions.

For instance, the question about Obama’s “cool style” comes from a one-on-one interview back in May, 2007.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You have a very cool style when you’re doing those town meetings, when you’re out on the campaign trail. And I wonder, how much of that is tied to your race?
OBAMA: That’s interesting.

Following that interview Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Maynard Caliendo co-blog their dismay:

We LOVE the response. “It’s interesting,” which means, “what the hell is THAT supposed to mean?! All black people are ‘cool?’”

Lastly, Think Progress has the audio clip making the Hannity-Stephanopoulos connection.

HANNITY: There are two questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. One is – the only time he’s ever been asked about his association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground who on 9/11 of all days in the New York Times was saying “I don’t regret setting bombs. I don’t think we did enough.” When asked about it by the Politico, David Axelrod said that they have a friendly relationship, and that they had done a number of speeches together and that they sat on a board together. Is that a question you might ask?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I’m taking notes right now.

Click image to see full cartoon.

So the Shiny Librarian gets me hip to infodoodads, which means I learn about all kindsa nifty sites, widgets and whatnot to play with, including silobreaker, a news and information gathering portal that will replace whatever love I have for googlenews, especially because it offers this addictive little toy: News Trends.

News Trends is a search engine that graphs media attention trends on a given subject. For fun, I thought I would compare media coverage for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan over the past 12 months. I’m cynical. I think Spears and Lohan will trounce Obama and Clinton. After all, neither Clinton nor Obama have flashed their genitals at paparazzi, at least not in the time period in which this data has been gathered.

I am wrong.

Well, wrong about media attention, not genitalia exposure. It turns out the media finds Obama and Clinton far more interesting than Spears and Lohan. I realize I am setting the bar pretty low, but I am happily surprised.

What’s really cool about silobreaker in general and this graph generating tool in particular is that it offers some handy research tools students can use for class projects. No, the shit ain’t peer-reviewed, and you might want to issue the usual caveats about research methodology (for instance, the developers claim to use “relational analysis” but do not explain how that is actually designed in their search algorithms.) But I think it’s a good introduction to research for beginners, a way to get them thinking about information, how to display it visually, and how to manipulate it. It may also stimulate them to draw unusual connections. Or, as in my case, subvert a priori assumptions.

Click the image to see the full cartoon.

Despite a vow to myself to avoid all articles or blog posts with the words “Hillary” or “Obama” in them, I have failed spectacularly. Shoot, I just posted on Hillary Clinton’s tenacity the other day. It’s what Britney Spears is to most people; I can’t look away.

Maybe it’s because she is so hell-bent on self-aggrandizement. Or because she resorts to the most Right wing methods of attacking a fellow Democrat. For instance, I think this Bok cartoon, bad as it is, gets at what bothers me so much about Clinton’s “not my pastor” opportunism. Like Bok, she is mainlining white fears of The Black Anti-American Other, while adding her own personal dollop of goody two-shoes condescension. “My pastor never said anything controversial, mnyah-mnyah-mnyah.” Or, as I vented at MightyGodKing the other day (see, not avoiding well at all):

Hey, Hillary, ya know why you wouldn’t have belonged to Obama’s church and had Jim Wright as your pastor? Because you’re fucking white! Were you not listening to your rival’s speech last week? About the racism, and the history, and the anger? Hel-looo? You went to a lily-white everybody fold their hands and don’t fart too loud church. You went to a church where people didn’t come in the door completely oppressed and pissed off and wanting to let off steam. You’ve spent the last 35 years in the privileged enclaves of ivy league and political elites. Obama may have been teaching at the UC, but he stayed with the same church for 20 years. That means the community that church belongs to. So shove your opportunistic self-righteousness bullshit!

So, yeah, I need to take a breather from the Democratic in-fighting. This recent Gallup Poll doesn’t help things, either. Seriously? McCain? Granted, in 2000 11% of Democrats went for Bush, including 13% of self-identified liberals, so what do I know?

Every time I think Hillary Clinton or her campaign has done something to destroy her bid for the Democratic nomination, I get surprised by the persistence - stubbornness? - of her supporters. Even if Republican mischief-makers drove Clinton toward a dubious victory in Texas, she still had solid backing from traditional Democratic voters.

So I won’t declare that her recent explanation that she “misspoke” when padding her foreign policy resumé is The End. That’s what I thought about Geraldine Ferraro’s racist comments about Barack Obama, but shortly after Ferraro resigned in a huff, Obama had to contend with controversial statements from his pastor. Granted, the scandal prompted Obama to deliver one of the best speeches delivered by a politician on race relations in America - a definite lemons-into-lemonade trick -  so he could count that as a win. But it doesn’t necessarily count as a loss for Clinton; it only makes her struggle more difficult. And for all its transcendent rhetoric, Obama’s speech did not satisfy conservatives, who are sharpening their Anti-American Pastor knives for the Fall, should Obama survive Clinton’s challenge. And she is already using those knives herself.

No, Clinton saying she didn’t inhale sniper fire merely proves that she’s a Clinton. If anything sinks her campaign, it will be the cumulative effect of husband Bill’s bungling in South Carolina; the 3AM red telephone ad; her talking up of John McCain’s foreign policy experience; Ferraro’s cranky self-portrait as a victim of both sexism and reverse-racism; and James Carville’s recent smear of Governor Bill Richardson as a “Judas” for endorsing Obama over Clinton (and refusal to back down.) And the Bosnia thing.

None of these things is the definitive Last Straw, but altogether they will break the camel. I doubt the “Supers” whom Clinton is counting on are going to take kindly to Carville’s trashing of one of the most respected political figures the party has produced in the last twenty years. They may not have nominated Richardson for President, but Democrats across the board value Richardson’s experience as a governor, statesman, and legislator; no one would blink should be become a Veep candidate, or a Secretary of State in a future Democratic administration. Plus, seriously — he’s a nice guy! WTF?

Sure, Carville’s the “Ragin’ Cajun.” Perhaps folks will roll their eyes and move on. But his remarks will be a factor among many that are piling up in Clinton’s deficit column. As many others have noted, Clintons best bet is to utterly destroy Obama’s electability through racist coding, Right wing fear-mongering, and an utter disregard for the rules. Oh, and to destroy the Democratic Party in the process. I’m no Democrat — I tend to view the party as the “good cop” to the Republican “bad cop” of capitalism — but poor folks and historically oppressed groups benefit most from the party’s progressive elements. Another lost election, another four years of McCain-Bushismo, and the party goes the way of the Whigs.

The only upside there is that progressive and centrist parties could arise to fill the void.

Hmmmm….

Samantha Power has resigned and apologized for remarks about Senator Hillary Clinton, which the LA Times quotes as follows:

“We f—— up in Ohio,” Power said in the interview posted on the newspaper’s website. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.”She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” Power said, trying to withdraw her remark.

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh.’ But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

The “monster” bit goes too far, it is true. But the rest of it? Well, obviously Clinton won more than just Ohio, but that last paragraph and “stooping to anything” sound about right to me.

So is this the part of the media narrative on Obama where the Golden Boy begins to stumble into a relentlessly negative news cycle from which only he can save himself through a possible Comeback in Pennsylvania? Is this where the decision to “go negative” undermines his Lofty Campaign of Hope and Change?

“Old Republican tactics” - like, say, implying that your opponent is a threat to national security and the safety of your children? How about threatening to sue if election results and process rules don’t give you the outcome you desire?