Donald T. Sterling, Cliven Bundy, President Obama & the Rest Of Us

Left to right: Donald T. Sterling, Owner of the Los Angeles
Clippers, and President Barack Obama

Ray,

You're absolutely 100% correct in your critical assessment of Obama's all too typically insipid, bumbling, and frankly inept response to yet still ANOTHER national racist incident in what has in the past five years become an unending series of openly vicious and/or lethal attacks on the humanity of African American citizens in this country. Everyone that I've spoken to around the country and especially out here on the left coast about these latest episodes (e.g. Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy, etc.) are up in arms not only about these continuous attacks but are like me and every single person I know are equally LIVID about the outright pathetic and even cowardly performance of the President who astonishingly as you've very accurately described looks, sounds, and acts like some incredibly clueless, hapless, long suffering purveyor of white guilt more than anything else. I can't begin to tell you how truly incensed and outraged so many African Americans are around the country concerning what you've so clearly addressed in your letter. My wife and I in fact were fuming about precisely what you've mentioned here yesterday as we watched Obama stand behind the podium at a press conference in Malaysia looking for all the world like a trembling deer in the headlights of a MAC TRUCK. From the infamous Skip Gates episode when the Harvard professor was unjustly arrested and handcuffed by white cop in Cambridge, Mass. in his own home (remember the idiotic "beer summit"?) to the notorious Shirley Sherrod incident where both the President and the NAACP initially made blatantly false accusations rooted in their ignorant fear of white backlash against her--without even trying to discover the facts or find out the truth beforehand-- to the wanton racist murders of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis and his ludicrous "Brother's Keeper" initiative which I wrote about in the Panopticon Review on March 4, 2014, Obama has consistently been downright cowardly in his feeble responses. For contrast imagine what Obama would have said if these exact same episodes like the brazen white supremacist stunt that Cliven Bundy pulled off this week had been attempted by an African American or a Latino American male. Imagine if black adult men were racially stalking and murdering unarmed white teenage youths and insisting they were more than justified in doing so. Just imagine! I can absolutely guarantee you that Obama wouldn't be stuttering and muttering in a wimpering passive voice, that's for damn sure, because you can be assured that White America wouldn't tolerate these incidents or a mealy-mouthed response from the President for a NANOSECOND...

Thank you for your incisive and truthful remarks brother. They are not only deadly accurate but need to be repeated as often as possible--and will be!-- across this country because we all know--or should by now!--that these heinous displays of white supremacy are only going to get worse in the wake of the President's and our own currently pathetic and inept national responses to them. In this lethal context, "the more things stay the same, the less Obama changes" is sadly and infuriatingly at this point a gross understatement...

Kofi

Subject: Re: Obama, mediocre again
by Rayfield Waller
 
He's done it again.

In responding at some podium somewhere (never from the Oval Office, which might give a veneer of official pronouncement to his mumblings) to the news of an NBA team owner speaking out loud the racism the rest of the owners only think and act on daily without words, President Obama reacted with all the focus, clarity, and vision of a dead fish. As he spoke haltingly, oddly, in a tone that somehow sounded as if he was suffering White guilt (??) he demonstrated again how when race is the matter, his wits go wandering in a gyre of passive voice locutions featuring a gaggle of past participles accompanied by few if any verbs.

He displayed this typical reluctance of his to say anything firm and decisive or God forbid even declarative about perhaps intervening in a rising tide of ugly American, popular racism. His refusal to speak of maybe even acting on his own presidential powers is unaffected it seems even by a safe distance from America--he muttered and hawed this time from a foreign country, using one of their podia rather than the White House Press Corp's bull room podium. It's not necessary to 'o anything' he essentially said, because when people talk so hatefully about African Americans (and in this case, by derivation, Latinos too), 'you just let them talk,' and wait on them to hang themselves, presumably.

The president assured the foreign press, who seemed more concerned for the well-being of Blacks than a Black president did, that 'these sorts of things' (expressions of contempt for African Americans broadcast on national and international TV in the form of a millionaire, unaware that he was being recorded, displaying not just racism, but misogyny in the bargain as he berates his Latina significant other about interacting with Black people) still crop up from time to time.

Like gout, presumably.

It reminds me of what I wrote about Obama in Panopticon Review back in July 2013 following the Zimmerman verdict acquitting Trayvon Martin's murderer:

"When pressed by horrific racial events he sets his words on a trajectory of bathos rather than critique."

The more things stay the same, the less Obama changes.

Ray

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html?_r=0

Cliven Bundy, flanked by supporters, has become a celebrity, drawing hundreds of sympathizers. Credit John Locher/Las Vegas Review-Journal, via Associated Press

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

--Cliven Bundy, White Supremacist Rancher and Deadbeat
 
All,

So let me get this straight: This deadbeat/criminal/white supremacist/fascist asshole owes the U.S. government over one million $ in land fees, refuses to pay despite having his ranch subsidized by the government, then confronts said government with his own little heavily armed militia and acquires major political support from a large prominent national group of Republicans and Tea Party leaders (not to mention a huge number of white American supporters nationwide) for his psychotic actions, and then viciously attacks black people in the most vile, lethal, and despicable terms possible AND GETS AWAY WITH IT ALL...Meanwhile President Obama makes the following typically evasive, weak-kneed, and absurdly muddled comment to the editor and writer David Remnick in his revealing January 27, 2014 interview with the President in the New Yorker magazine regarding the dangerously fatuous historical connections between racism/white supremacy, political ideology, Bill Clinton,the Obama Presidency and the modern Democratic and Republican Parties:

“There were times in our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.”

My point here is that between the extremely dangerous yet wholly predictable number of far too many white American citizens who openly embrace, endorse, celebrate and strongly identify with Bundy's reactionary madness and the smug, self satisfied hubris, as well as oddly clueless confusion about and defensive denial of the President's and the Democratic Party's general ineptitude/incompetence in properly confronting and addressing the actual ideological and political dangers of white supremacy/racism in the civic public sphere this society is not only imploding, but is once again being systematically led into a racial and class based cataclysm that especially targets, scapegoats and assaults African Americans in the name of profit, "patriotism", the second amendment, and states rights. If all this sounds suspiciously like the popular "return" to and fierce justification of Jim Crow apartheid and/or "slavery by another name" then you clearly understand exactly what Cliven Bundy and his national army of supporters and fellow travelers really mean by the ominous phrase "taking the country back." And despite what the President and far too many smug and myopic liberals, neoliberals, and progressives may think contrary to popular opinion: THIS IS NOT MERELY A (SICK) JOKE...The Bundys (and trust me, there are millions of them in this maniacal country) actually mean what they say... We would do well to not only take them very seriously but defeat them, or be prepared to eventually suffer the broader consequences...Stay tuned...

Kofi

A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
APRIL 23, 2014
New York Times

BUNKERVILLE, Nev. — Cliven Bundy stood by the Virgin River up the road from the armed checkpoint at the driveway of his ranch, signing autographs and posing for pictures. For 55 minutes, Mr. Bundy held forth to a clutch of supporters about his views on the troubled state of America — the overreaching federal government, the harassment of Western ranchers, the societal upheaval caused by abortion, even musing about whether slavery was so bad.

Most of all, Mr. Bundy, 67, who was wearing a broad-brimmed white cowboy hat against the hot afternoon sun, recounted the success of “we the people” — gesturing to the 50 supporters, some armed with handguns and rifles, standing in a semicircle before him — at chasing away Bureau of Land Management rangers who, acting on a court order, tried to confiscate 500 cattle owned by Mr. Bundy, who has been illegally grazing his herd on public land since 1993.

RELATED COVERAGE

Rancher’s Views on Race Send Supporters Fleeing APRIL 24, 2014

The Lede: Video of Rancher Cliven Bundy’s Remarks on Race    APRIL 24, 2014

“They don’t have the guts enough to try to start that again for a few years,” Mr. Bundy said in an interview.

Mr. Bundy’s standoff with federal rangers — propelled into the national spotlight in part by steady coverage by Fox News — has highlighted sharp divisions over the power of the federal government and the rights of landowners in places like this desert stretch of Nevada, where resentment of Washington and its sprawling ownership of Western land has long run deep.

His cause has won support from Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky who is likely to run for president. Senator Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican, referred to Mr. Bundy’s supporters as “patriots.” Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is the Senate majority leader and has a long history of pushing for protection of public lands, denounced the rancher’s supporters as “domestic terrorists.”

The dispute spilled over this week into Texas, where Greg Abbott, the attorney general and a Republican running for governor, challenged the Bureau of Land Management on reports that it was looking to claim thousands of acres along the Red River.

For now, Mr. Bundy appears to have won, forcing the government to back down after its rangers were met with armed Bundy supporters this month.

“The gather is now over,” said Craig Leff, a deputy assistant director with the Bureau of Land Management. “Our focus is pursuing this matter administratively and judicially.”

His sympathizers include dozens of militia members, many carrying weapons.
 
Credit Jim Urquhart/Reuters

But if the federal government has moved on, Mr. Bundy — a father of 14 and a registered Republican — has not.

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

A spokesman for Mr. Paul, informed of Mr. Bundy’s remarks, said the senator was not available for immediate comment. Chandler Smith, a spokesman for Mr. Heller, said that the senator “completely disagrees with Mr. Bundy’s appalling and racist statements, and condemns them in the most strenuous way.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Abbott, Laura Bean, said that the letter he wrote “was regarding a dispute in Texas and is in no way related to the dispute in Nevada.

The crowds may be beginning to dwindle, but for much of the past two weeks, here at Mr. Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, the rancher has been a celebrity, drawing hundreds of supporters, including dozens of militia members, many carrying sidearms, and members of Oath Keepers, a militia group, who have embraced him as a symbol of their anger and a bulwark against federal abuse.

He was honored at a celebratory party on Friday night attended by 1,500 people, who wore “domestic terrorist” name tags, listened to cowboy poetry and ate hamburgers, hot dogs and Bundy beef. “This is the beginning of taking America back,” said Shawna Cox, who had come from Kanab, Utah, to support him.

Mr. Bundy, whose family has grazed cattle here since they homesteaded in the 1870s, owes the government more than $1 million in grazing fees. He stopped paying after the bureau ordered him to restrict the periods when his herd roamed the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area as part of an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise.

Mr. Bundy’s case happened to heat up around the time that Mr. Paul, building the foundation for a presidential campaign, struck a chord with some members of the Republican Party with warnings about governmental overreach. Mr. Paul’s latest book is titled “Government Bullies: How Everyday Americans Are Being Harassed, Abused and Imprisoned by the Feds.” In the Bundy standoff, Mr. Paul has criticized the federal government as overreaching with its use of regulations, but cautioned against any violence or lawbreaking.

Rob Mrowka, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been battling to get Mr. Bundy to move his cattle in deference to the tortoises, said the standoff had come to symbolize divisions across the country about the role of government, particularly here in the West

Sympathizers have embraced Mr. Bundy as a symbol of their anger and a bulwark against federal abuse.
Credit Ronda Churchill for The New York Times

“It’s symbolic of the polarization and divide within the country that we saw starting with the Obama election,” he said. “This is merely a surrogate for bigger issue and topic in America today — it’s the whole idea of federalism versus states.”

The federal government owns 85 percent of the land in Nevada, a statistic repeatedly noted by Mr. Bundy’s supporters as they denounced the actions of the government. Six cattle, including two that had Bundy brands, died during the attempt to collect the animals.

“Western states don’t have the control over their land that Eastern states have over their land,” said Ivan Jones, 60, a brick mason who came here from Northern California. “Someone like the Bundys, they have been here for generations, before the B.L.M. was ever created, using this land to graze their animals. And the B.L.M. comes in and changes the rule. A small little rancher trying to make a living and they come in like big bullies.”

Toby Purvis, 51, an electrician who came here from Farmington, N.M., called the bureau operation “a land grab.”

“This is happening all over the country right now,” he said.

Mr. Bundy’s case is clearly divisive. About 16,000 ranchers across the country pay relatively modest fees for their herds to use public land. The Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, while expressing sympathy with some of Mr. Bundy’s complaints, pointedly did not endorse his methods.

“This should not be confused with civil disobedience,” Mr. Mrowka said. “This is outright anarchy going on here.”

Mr. Bundy disputes the legitimacy of both the bureau and the courts that have ruled against him. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to honor a federal court that has no jurisdiction or authority or arresting power over we the people,” he said.

Still, as Mr. Bundy surveyed the dusty landscape last weekend, the only sign of law enforcement was Brad Rogers, the sheriff of Elkhart County, Ind., who had flown 1,800 miles to stand in solidarity with the embattled rancher.

With the rangers gone, “I don’t feel any threat — that’s a big change,” Mr. Bundy said. At the same time, he said he saw no reason for his supporters to leave. “As long as we are getting together as a group and as long as we feel good about being here, we are going to be here,” he said

One of Mr. Bundy’s sons, Ammon, 38, a car fleet manager from Phoenix, said his father had taught the federal government a lesson. “We ran them out of here,” he said, sitting in a trailer set up near one of the protesters’ camp sites. “We were serious. We weren’t playing around.”

But Alan O’Neill, who had a similar struggle with Mr. Bundy when he was superintendent of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, expressed concern that the government had backed down.

“He calls himself a patriot, and says he loves America,” Mr. O’Neill said. “And yet he says he won’t follow any federal laws. You just can’t let this go by, or everybody is going to be like, ‘If Bundy can break the law, why can’t I?"

Lynnette Curtis contributed reporting from Bunkerville.

CAROLYN EDGAR
(b. 1966)
 

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/modern_racists_just_repeat_conservative_talking_points_donald_sterling_cliven_bundy_and_the_ugly_face_of_gop_policies/
 

Modern racists just repeat conservative talking points: Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy and the ugly face of GOP policies

Sterling and Bundy aren't vestiges of another time. They are the embodiment of Paul Ryan  and Michele Bachmann's ideas
 
by CAROLYN EDGAR
APR 28, 2014
SALON

During a recent soccer match between Barcelona and Villarreal, a fan threw a banana at Barcelona player Dani Alves as he was about to take a corner kick. Instead of getting upset, Alves, who is Brazilian, calmly picked up the banana, took a bite of it and took his kick.

In much the same way that Alves treated the fan’s bigoted act as a gift, we can consider the antics this past week of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling as gifts and opportunities to accept Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s invitation in her dissent in Schuette v. Bamn — to “speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.”

Bundy’s ramblings about “the Negro,” and Sterling’s insecurity about his mixed-race girlfriend posting pictures on Instagram of herself with black people, provide insight into what Sterling referred to as the “culture” of racial discrimination that persists in our society. Bundy and Sterling exemplify why all Americans need to openly and honestly discuss race, the retrenchment of laws guaranteeing equal protection and protecting civil rights, and the resurgence of white supremacy that has grown even more acute since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama.

It would be easy, as many undoubtedly will, to dismiss Bundy and Sterling as anachronisms – as throwbacks to a time when racism was accepted and Jim Crow was the law of much of the land. To some, Cliven Bundy may be just a crazy old rancher spouting nonsense. Former Bundy supporters like Sean Hannity quickly distanced themselves from his remarks, and Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer took pains to note that Bundy does not represent the GOP.

But Bundy’s remarks about the good ol’ days of slavery, when black families were intact and raising chickens and tending gardens, are similar to the rhetoric espoused by a “marriage pledge” signed by former GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann – a pledge claiming ”a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

Bundy’s comments about black men sitting idle also echoed recent comments made by Republican congressman Paul Ryan, who decried the lack of work ethic among “inner city” men. While Bundy may not be a GOP spokesman, he is pretty good at repeating conservative talking points.

For his part, Donald Sterling is not only the owner of the Clippers, he is also a real estate mogul who has faced numerous lawsuits alleging that he discriminated against blacks and Hispanics who sought to rent his apartment units. He is not simply a harmless old bigot speaking nonsense in the heat of a lovers’ quarrel with his much-younger mistress. Sterling’s well-documented racism was largely ignored by the NBA and the mainstream media for years. Now, people profess to be “outraged” by his views.

The media circus surrounding Bundy and Sterling exemplifies why the nature of our discourse about race and racism must change. Although it has traditionally been easier for the media to focus on individual racist acts instead of systemic white supremacy, it is far less useful to focus on individual racist acts, and far more important to recognize what modern racism looks like in practice, up close and personal.

Modern racism is not Bull Connor turning fire hoses and dogs on black people. Modern racism is the reinforcement of white supremacy through systemic, institutional polices, practices and laws that deny equal protection to people of color, regardless of one’s own personal views. While modern racism is often fueled by personal animus, it may thrive even in the absence of it. Modern racism seeks to protect the majority and preserve the status quo, usually without express discriminatory intent. And it exists regardless of political affiliation.

Jonathan Chait recently argued that modern-day conservatism is doomed because its sociological underpinning is white supremacy. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently stated, “White supremacy does not contradict American democracy — it birthed it, nurtured it, and financed it. That is our heritage.” As Coates points out, without a corresponding commitment to ending white supremacy, anti-racism alone is unlikely to result in true equality for all.

A favorite refrain of those who claim that talking about race divides the nation and reinforces racial stereotypes, is that we are all one race – the human race. If that is true, then it is in our collective best interest to eradicate policies that have a consistent and deleterious impact on blacks and other minority groups. If we are all one race, then a system that denies one segment of our society the right and the ability to participate fully in its rewards should be unacceptable to all. The American Dream is meaningless if it remains inaccessible to most of America’s minority citizens.

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it is a good time to acknowledge that the tools that dismantled Jim Crow 60 years ago are inadequate to address systemic inequality today. We need new tools to repair a socioeconomic, political and judicial system that, despite the numerous gains made in the last 60 years, remains separate and unequal.

Although the writer Teju Cole warned that we should not “get excited over racist old coots: they are valves, taking pressure off conversations we need to have about systemic white supremacy,” the resurgence of racist old white men like Bundy and Sterling invites us to have a different, more honest conversation about race and racism. We can, and should, start talking about what we, as a society, are going to do to ensure that white supremacy ceases to be a structural impediment to equal opportunity. And it is time to challenge those who favor race-blind rhetoric to ensure that their “one race” vision becomes reality, instead of pretending racism is a problem that no longer exists.

Tricia Rose, Rayfield Waller, and Tavis Smiley On the Incoherent and Woefully Inadequate Responses of President Obama To the Real Meaning and Significance of the Trayvon Martin Verdict and the Grave Necessity of a Deeper Critique

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/brown-universitys-tricia-rose/

DR. TRICIA ROSE

All,

A probing, insightful, dynamic, and very valuable discussion between renowned black public intellectual, cultural critic, author, scholar, teacher, and activist Tricia Rose and PBS program host Tavis Smiley on the meaning and serious implications. of the Trayvon Martin verdict.  Please click on the links above and below and spread the word...

Kofi 

JULY 15, 2013--DR. TRICIA ROSE

PROGRAM INTRODUCTION BY TAVIS SMILEY ON PBS:

The internationally respected scholar and director of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America analyzes the racial implications in the U.S. of trials like the Zimmerman case.

Tricia Rose is an Africana studies professor at Brown University, whose specialties include 20th- and 21st-century African American culture and politics and gender issues. She recently assumed the post of director of the university's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. A pioneering expert in the study of hip-hop, she's written two books on the subject: the classic Black Noise, and The Hip Hop Wars. She also authored the path-breaking Longing to Tell, about women and sexuality. The native New Yorker completed her Ph.D. in American studies at Brown and has taught at NYU, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Bremen University in Germany.

PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

Tavis: Once again, a verdict in a high-stakes trial has shunned and stunned many in this country, and reignited the debate about race and the justice system that has smoldered for generations.

A Florida jury’s decision to acquit George Zimmerman of killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old boy, has outraged many Americans who find it hard to accept that in 2013 an African American teenager could be killed while walking home from a store, and no one is held accountable.

Joining me tonight from New York to talk about where we as a nation go from here, Professor Tricia Rose, the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Professor Rose, good to have you back on this program.

Professor Tricia Rose: Thank you, Tavis. It’s great to be back.

Tavis: Let me start by asking a pretty simple question: Your take on the verdict when you heard it.

Rose: Well, the first feeling was profound sadness, which was trying to translate itself into anger at every turn. Then a strange sort of realization that it really wasn’t that surprising. That, of course, issued a whole nother wave of sadness for whole different reasons.

But those were my initial responses, and I want to stay focused on the emotion and not the outcome, because I think that’s really at the heart of the crisis that we’re in.

Tavis: What’s the value of staying focused on the emotion?

Rose: Well, because it’s very easy to turn to an incredible sense of rage, really, and it’s important to think about how that rage destroys the very efforts for building community.

So keeping the sadness and certainly some anger, but turning it into sort of looking at the circumstances, thinking big picture, helps put this terrible tragedy and the death of Trayvon Martin in a much broader context. That context, it seems to me, is our way out.

Tavis: I sat for a conversation with George Stephanopoulos on ABC yesterday on “This Week,” the Sunday morning program, and this very issue that you’ve raised a moment ago came up in our dialogue yesterday, Tricia, and that is this notion of – and there’s no scientific data that I am aware of to prove this, but you’re an African American, clearly I’m an African American, and if you were, I think, to have polled Black folk days ago in barber shops and beauty salons, nobody expected in Black America that this outcome would be different.

We were hoping against hope that justice might be served here, as we see it, at least, but nobody expected, to your earlier point, that this would end any different. What, then, does it say 50 years after the March on Washington that we’ll celebrate in just a few days from now that so many in the African American community and beyond have so little hope, so little faith and trust in our system of jurisprudence?

Rose: Well, it is a devastating indictment. It seems to me unless one wants to make an irrational argument that all African Americans are paranoid and delusional – of course there are some people who would, but most reasonable people wouldn’t.

If you’re not going to go that route, you have to ask the question why are African Americans so injured, so hurt, so suspicious, so unhopeful about this so-called great democracy with a great judicial system.

When you ask that question seriously, the evidence that mounts for deep, unjust treatment, unjust application of law on all kinds of levels, unjust levels of sentencing, surveillance, illegitimate modes of discrimination in every other facet of everyday life is so overwhelming that the answers are present for us.

In other words, the reason to hope against hope is not unclear. Yet we run from that data. We’re unable to seriously confront it, and retreat to a very almost Pollyanna narrative about the ways in which we’ve improved. Which, by the way, Tavis, I’m very excited to support.

Yes, things have gotten much better in many ways, but they’ve also gotten worse, and if we don’t keep our eyes focused on this in community, in conversation, with serious data, we’re destined to maintain the kinds of inequality that are devastating for communities around the country.

Tavis: As I sat for this conversation that I was a part of yesterday on ABC with this high-profile panel of well-known Americans who were about to engage in a conversation about this verdict, I sat there, Tricia, and what you expect on these Sunday morning shows is really a sort of politically correct, dispassionate discourse about the issues of the day.

That was not the role that I could play yesterday, because for me, this is personal. I raise that because I wonder to what extent so many Americans of any race, color, creed, don’t get this because it is not for them personal.

As I sat on that panel looking at all of my fellow hosts, I didn’t really want to go here. I went a few places that caused some discomfort, as you can imagine, to begin with, but I was thinking at one point to say this and I just didn’t.

Which is I wonder how differently this conversation would be if the moderator’s child had been shot, if the colleagues I was sitting next to, if their child had been shot and killed.

That’s a long way of getting to taking race out of it, and how it is that in this culture, this media culture that we and the pundits talk about this issues all day long in a dispassionate sort of way because we can’t put ourselves in the shoes of person X, Y, or Z.

Rose: Right. Well, the question of empathy is at the heart of any genuine sort of building of community and understanding, and empathy requires that you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of another.

Of course it’s true, when you’re in a professional setting you might in fact lose track of individuals and try to follow a story, but this is more than that. It’s more than just a neutral lack of empathy.

It’s that we have cultivated both a media culture and an educational culture that reduces the ability for whites and others who are more privileged to understand modes of serious racial disadvantage, and the fear and anxiety that particular poor African American men have to deal with to survive in this country.

That is a studied way of not addressing the structural constraints that we’re dealing with now. Tavis, you may have worried yesterday about not being impassioned, but the nation’s media has been deeply impassioned around all kinds of issues – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Hurricane Sandy.

So the notion of being impassioned when one feels implicated and empathetically attached is always present in the media, but it doesn’t get extended to the lived experience of African Americans in anywhere near the way it should.

Tavis: So when I made it to the airport after appearing on the show yesterday and flew back to Los Angeles last night, I landed because I wanted to get – I had to get to a screening of a movie that I’m sure you and others in the country have heard about.

It’s called “Fruitvale Station,” about the killing of Oscar Grant a few years ago in Oakland. So sort of the same situation – Black young male being shot and killed by a white male under the color of enforcement or neighborhood watch – in this case, a BART officer.

The point of this is I got off the plane, went immediately to this screening, and could not get out of my seat at the end of the screening because I could not stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying.

I know the Oscar Grant story very well, but I couldn’t stop crying personally because the movie was so brilliant in connecting us to the humanity of Oscar Grant. I’m going somewhere with this. Give me a second here.

I’m in a movie theater with a whole bunch of white folk, overwhelmingly white, and everybody in that theater is crying. By the way, I should mention that tomorrow night on this program we will have the star of “Fruitvale Station” and the director for a conversation tomorrow night on this program; hence my need to see the movie before they come on tomorrow night.

But I was moved, Tricia, because the movie did a wonderful job of getting to the humanity of Oscar Grant. It’s a long way of asking how much of what happens to Trayvon or to Oscar Grant, to nameless persons into the future, countless persons, perhaps, into the future, because we can’t find a way to revel in the humanity specifically of Black males?

Rose: Right. Well, Tavis, as usual, you’ve hit it right on the head. You see, if you have a system that the evidence overwhelmingly shows not only discriminates but targets, tracks, criminalizes, incarcerates and normalizes a level of social violence.

If you have a system like that, humanizing that constituency fundamentally threatens the logic of that system. It means you have to pursue the injustice of the system.

We’re not comfortable with that because we haven’t really been able to stomach the contradiction that we’ve created by saying that we’re this egalitarian, post-segregationist, inclusive, multiracial democracy – that’s our narrative – and our practice, which falls seriously short.

So to resolve that we just deny it, really. What that film has done and what these stories do is sort of force us into the humanity, the potential humanity. Some resist it. But it’s very hard to resist when it’s done well.

It doesn’t mean that there are no African American young men worthy of punishment; it doesn’t mean that all African Americans are noble, but all African Americans and all people are entitled to an empathetic, fundamental humanity and a portrait of richness in humanity that we don’t see.

Let me just say one more thing – the news media in general, a Pew study very recently showed that almost half of all images of African Americans are either sports-related or them somehow being involved in crime.

Now you can’t constantly narrate people this way and not narrate them in other humanizing ways without dehumanizing people’s perception. That’s the world we’ve created, among other things, that makes it very hard to understand why African Americans are in so much pain, writ large, over what seem to be individual cases.

Tavis: But how can you love or like Barack Obama, how can you love Oprah, how can you love LeBron James, how can you love Tiger Woods – I could do this all day. You know where I’m going with this.

How can you love certain Negroes but not revel and celebrate the humanity of everyday Black people like Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant and others? There’s a disconnect here for me, and I’m not naïve in asking the question.

Rose: No, no, and this is a major crisis that we have. There is no requirement to confront the collective humanity of Black people in the context of celebrity culture, and we’ve created a kind of phantasmagorical, tiny group of highly well compensated, very visible Black people who are Black in a way that do not force us to look at the structures of everyday life.

The most important thing, Tavis, and this is very problematic, I think, is that their success – and I don’t mean this individually. You could name a hundred individuals and I would say the same thing.

Their success largely depends on not bringing to the fore this level of racial discrimination because of the potential downside of making certain markets less interested in them, or audience members are alienating consumers.

So what might have happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, where Black athletes, entertainers, musicians would speak freely and consistently about social justice issues, not just because it was a civil rights movement but because that’s what being in the community meant and having a leadership position.

It’s almost impossible to expect mainstream Black leadership in the cultural or social or political arena to do that consistently without jeopardizing that position, and that’s what I call inclusive discrimination.

That’s a very dangerous process, because it makes things look like one thing when they’re really entirely another, and the most visible people, who have the leverage, have really been neutered from being able to contribute in a powerful way.

Tavis: There are two things that have struck me as interesting in the last 24, 48 hours about the path forward with regard to the Obama administration and Black people and the issue of race and this case. Number one, African Americans now have to rely on an African American attorney general, the first African American attorney general, if this case is going to have any additional life.

Now I could be wrong about this; I pray that I am. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The irony is for all the jumping up and down, for all the celebrating, for all the speaking in tongues, for all the adulation, adoration of this administration, Black people now who care about this case – and not just Black folk, people across the board.

But since we’re talking about Black folk in particular, African Americans now are in an interesting position of having to rely on a Black president and a Black attorney general to do something about what happened here, and I don’t think it’s going to happen, for a lot of reasons, including some legal reasons which we won’t get into right now.

But the point is I don’t think it’s going to happen, even though that’s who they have to rely on. Secondly, though – that’s an interesting irony to me. But the second thing here is that the president’s statement, let me just be frank about how I feel about it.

His statement about this was as weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid. Now, Black folk who drink pre-sweetened Kool-Aid will understand exactly what I mean by that, but it was weak.

Now it was politically correct, but as much as Barack Obama has tried to avoid the race question in his first and second term, he keeps getting slapped upside the head with all these cases and these incidents that open the door, that give him an opportunity to lead America in a real conversation about race.

He’s punted that opportunity every single time. He is no longer up for reelection, he is safely in a second term, and yet we still get this milquetoast statement out of the White House about this when the majority, the most loyal part of his base, which is African American, is now looking to his administration, to his Justice Department, to do something about it, and everybody’s doing that with bated breath.

That’s a commentary that was way too long, but I want your thought – and I admit that, but again, I can’t be dispassionate about this at this point because I am a Black male and I’ve got seven younger brothers who are Black males.

So forgive me for that little speech, but the point here is I want to get to your take on, since you went there, how our body politic and specifically the Obama administration responds to this, because this is not just an isolated incident.

Rose: Yeah. No, no, it’s not. Well, here’s my feeling, and I said this before Obama was elected the first time. I said that I did not think, as a scholar who teaches multiracial classrooms in college at Brown, mostly white, but multiracial.

That given what I know people do not know about the contemporary modes of structural discrimination, given what I know about the retreat to a strange fantasy world called colorblindness and an even crazier universe called post-race, that I did not think that a Black president could do anything but become, in a sense, an albatross for us getting to a racial conversation.

Now some people think that’s letting Obama off the hook, and that argument could be made. But I think it’s very important to put Obama in context. Obama is operating in an American cultural world that has spent the last 30 years convincing itself that if we stop looking at race we will fix structural racism.

That because we have ended, or shall I say reduced government or state-sponsored segregation and bigotry and publicly acceptable hate speech, that because we’ve largely reduced and almost ended that, that somehow we’ve ended structural racism.

We’ve done no such thing. We’ve just changed the language that frames structural racism. So it seemed to me that Obama was not the person who could do what you’re asking a Black president in a, I call the traditional sense of the word, could do.

I think that that’s the reality. Now here’s my great hope – I’m trying to find a silver lining for us here, Tavis. That is that this could be that moment of recognition that this isn’t going to be just about being Black, but it’s going to be about what’s your politics, and what are you willing to pursue.

This might hold all kinds of leaders accountable at every level – educational leaders, entertainers, political leaders, teachers, school board leaders, police, at every level.

I’m hoping that what we’ll say is how could it be that a Black president couldn’t do this? How could it be, if you’re right, that Holder and the Justice Department couldn’t do this? Was it just the case, or was it that being Black meant that you couldn’t lobby on behalf of Black Americans in any meaningful or fair way.

Tavis: Let me push back on that in two regards.

Rose: Sure.

Tavis: Number one, then, if you’re right about this, then what the heck is the value of us celebrating a Black president? Just say he’s the first person of color. But all this hoopla about his being the first Black president, if it doesn’t (unintelligible) to you in some meaningful way when your back is to the wall and your babies are being shot dead in the streets, if it doesn’t (unintelligible) to you in some meaningful way at that point, number one, what’s the value of having a Black president.

Number two, when it served his purpose during the campaign to have a talk about race from Constitution Hall, I believe, in Philadelphia, but certainly it was in Philadelphia.

When it was to his benefit to talk about race in the campaign to try to put some distance between him and Jeremiah Wright, he gave what many still regard as the most brilliant speech of his political career about race.

So he did talk about it back in the day. So my question – I’m not asking him to do anything, I’m not asking for a higher standard. I’m not asking him to do anything I wouldn’t ask another president to do.

Bill Clinton had a race commission. So I’m not trying to be unfair to the president. I’m just saying you have talked about race before, and if you are the president and you are the best person to help usher us into a conversation about this, why not do it?

Rose: Well, I think he should do it, and I think he should empanel a commission. I think he should empower the discussion, and I think that we can’t keep doing this kind of media dance where we say there are two sides and they’re very polarized.

Well, these are not really just two sides. There are actually many positions. But more importantly, there are positions that are flat-out hostile and unjust, and they shouldn’t be given equal time around – the same kinds of time that would be given to other positions.

This sort of fantasy that all positions are equal has to be ended, and we need to be much more forceful about saying what our vision is, what our goals are, and to pursue that.

So there’s no question to me that more conversation should be had and Obama should do more about it. But to me, I never had the expectations in the first place, and I think part of this is about what are we looking for.

Speaking here as an African American, what expectations do we have? Have we set the terms of the relationship with the American government, with local police, where we have a reason to expect proper and fair and just treatment or not?

I think most people know not, but we’re emotionally engaged, and that injury keeps being reopened. What I would like to encourage us all, progressive whites and liberal whites and brown and Asian Americans, everybody is welcome into this discussion.

What I’m hoping we can do is push back from the emotional into the okay, what are we going to do? When King said, as you opened this whole show, where do we go from here, it was not fantasy talk. It was not, “Let’s all get along.”

It was where do we go from here. How do we change our political expectations, how do we use the immense levels of research that’s out here to show us how bias happens, how Blackness gets understood as a crime historically and culturally and politically and otherwise, et cetera.

So I think that’s what we have to do. We can’t just get caught up in a kind of emotional expectation that to me the evidence is already in for. There isn’t going to be the conversation that you want to have, so the question is now where do we go.

Tavis: So I do have expectation, and disabuse me of this notion if I’m wrong about this. One of my expectations, my greatest expectation, in fact, is not of Barack Obama. Never mind the conversation we’ve just had. That’s not my greatest expectation.

My greatest expectation is that Black people will remain outraged about this, and the things that can be done will be done. Black people have been basically silent. There have been pockets of people raising their voices, but we have not been as vocal as we should have been in this fight about gun control.

So now that Mr. Zimmerman just that quick got his gun back, has his weapon back now, I wonder what Black people are going to say about gun control and about poverty and about so many other issues.

So again, I just think that it’s so lopsided, this honeymoon we’ve been on because we have an African American president. People have gotten lazy and people have been silenced and been sidelined. It takes Trayvon Martin to get our ire up, but I wonder how long that will last. Am I wrong to expect that we ought to do more and say more?

Rose: Oh, no. We ought to do more and say way more. Let me say one quick thing about the amazing mobilization of people of all walks of life in New York and L.A. and Oakland and more planned over the next weeks.

The pictures I’ve seen – I was on my way to New York during the Times Square sort of protest and vigil, and I was just so moved by just the tapestry of different racial and ethnic groups and classes and ages of people saying this is wrong, and this cannot go on.

I think that is the most inspiring thing I’ve seen. Now we have to do more, get involved, and to be critical of commercial media, we have to really pursue their refusal to frame issues in a way that invite Black people.

So when you say where are we on the gun control debate, where are we on the poverty debate, I think it’s not only that the national leadership has been quiet, of various organizations, but that issues that are not sensationalized in their Blackness don’t include Black people sufficiently.

We need to challenge that. The Sunday morning shows are almost 87 percent all white and all male. I’m glad you were there, but in general, that’s not the case. That’s unacceptable.

We need a diverse range of people with a wide range of points of view, and that’s going to have an impact on encouraging the kind of activism that we need to see. So I think it’s a new moment. Maybe I’m being Pollyanna and hopeful, but at least my hope gives us the possibility of making it so.

I think that’s what we need to do. We need to encourage young people that action does make a difference.

Tavis: I appreciate the work that you do at Brown University. I know that you delayed a trip with your brilliant husband, another scholar, Andre Willis. You guys are headed to Paris to do some work there.

Thank you for delaying the trip so that we could have this conversation tonight. Have a wonderful journey and we’ll talk again soon, but thanks for sharing your insights tonight, Professor.

Rose: I will. It was my pleasure, Tavis. Thanks for having me.

Tavis: That’s our show for tonight. Thanks for watching. As always, keep the faith.

“Announcer:” For more information on today’s show, visit Tavis Smiley at PBS.org.

“Wade Hunt:” There’s a saying that Dr. King had, and he said, “There’s always a right time to do the right thing.” I just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. We know that we’re only about halfway to completely eliminate hunger, and we have a lot of work to do. And Walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the U.S. As we work together, we can stamp hunger out.

“Announcer:” And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.


TRICIA ROSE BIOGRAPHY:

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She spent her childhood in Harlem and the Bronx. She graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies. She has taught at NYU, UC Santa Cruz, and is currently Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. In addition to her duties at Brown, Professor Rose sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Black Girls Rock, Inc. and will serve as the Lund-Gill Chair at Dominican University during the Spring 2014 semester.

Professor Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is considered foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995 voted among the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as one of its "Top Books of the Twentieth Century."

In 2003 Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women's sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop with: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters. In it, Rose argues that hip hop artists and the commercialization of black popular culture more generally has more power than ever to shape racial and gender images, perceptions and policies.

Tricia Rose lectures, engages in conversation and presents seminars and workshops to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice. Rose has been a CurrentTV contributor and has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR and other national and local media outlets. More of her work can be found in Time, Essence, The New York Times and The Village Voice to name a few. She encourages you to connect with her on her website, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

‘READY REACTION’ GROUPS are ascendant: Obama offers resistance that is too little even if it is not yet too late

by Rayfield A. Waller
The Panopticon Review
 

RAYFIELD WALLER
Photo by Patricia Calloway  2012

In the unfolding of media events since the Zimmerman verdict one can see the ever more clear outlines of a peculiar if familiarvisage: it presents different images to various Americans, inasmuch as it may be a Kristallnacht  brown-shirt for Jewish Americans or a southern Christian fundamentalist preacher for American women; for African Americans it is as it always has been, the visage of an old South ante-bellum, white-hooded ghost in the political machine.

President Obama’s latest remarks on the Trayvon Martin murder was a disorienting 39 minute address to the media (by surprise appearance before the Washington press corps last week where he spoke in rambling, apparently off the cuff musings that were drastically cut and parsed into chewable bytes by the major news outlets). It was the latest set piece in a continuing spectacle of The President fiddling while American race relations as well as women’s rights, and democracy itself, are burning.

What is burning off for African Americans in particular is the last of the veneer of ‘progress’ acquired from the Reconstruction era through the civil rights era. It is important for African Americans to admit and to face up to the persistence of a history that proves for us,even with a former constitutional law professor in the White House,that the constitution has never been an adequate guarantee of simple American citizenship. That persistent fact has made it necessarythroughout history to pass a passel of laws that have reemphasized,clarified, reaffirmed, expanded, and commanded enforcement, of what ought to have been inherent constitutional rights after the Emancipation. Unfortunately this endlessly piecemeal, extra-constitutional, judicial patchwork has, by stare decisis (legal precedent) served to render African American humanity and citizenship an eternally tenuous and fragile proposition subject to sudden legal,popular, and even supreme court-invoked reversals such as the recentarbitrary neutering of the Voting Rights Act by The Supreme Court’sremoving much of the enforcement powers of the Act.

African Americans’ right to citizenship, counter to our original status as de jure and de facto property, was a concept literally grafted onto the body politic after Lincoln’s Emancipation. This extraordinary right was delineated and established incrementally starting with the “Reconstruction Amendments” (the 13th, 14th, and 15th, ratified between 1865 and 1870 that respectively, abolished slavery, providedcitizenship and equal protection to former slaves—the former property of natural White citizens, and granted voting rights to those former slaves). These rights were further ‘clarified’ and thus cobbled togetherby the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 (the right to inheritance, to purchase lease and sell, to make and enforce contracts, to file suit, and other rights of citizenship), 1870 (the right to vote enforced by Congress), 1871 (the ‘protection law’ that provides for punishment of those seeking to deprive African Americans of the free exercise of rights),and 1875 (equal justice legislation outlawing denial of accommodations, access to facilities and privileges to African American citizens).

Further, in the ‘modern’ era came the 1948 ‘Executive Order 9981’ signed by President Truman declaring an end to de juresegregation still going on in the military despite the plethora of previous acts and the stark yet somehow insufficient clarity of three Reconstruction amendments; the victory of Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 that overturned the state sponsored segregation of the earlier Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896; the 1955 murder of Emmer Till in Mississippi followed by the Rosa Parks protest in Montgomery launching a modern ‘civil rights movement’ leading to and continuing the odd pattern of presidential intervention to enforce de facto what the laws claim de jure, when President Kennedy sent 5,000 federal troops to Mississippi to force Old Mississippi State University to admit Black applicant, Charles Meredith; a ‘March on Washington’ leading tothe 24th Amendment of 1964 abolishing the poll tax used in the south to defy earlier amendments, and culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But even this early the white hooded ghost in the political machine was plain to see, since the 1965 Act was in fact merely arestatement, as always—of the 15th Amendment, and of the Civil Rights Acts of 1870, granting the right to vote and 1871, protecting the rightto vote! The truth is as clear as the pages of history and need only be proven by reading those pages: we are property, despite whatever ‘strides’ we have striven and re-striven in the jargon of civil rights doctrine, and to property we continually return as the layers of laws meant to ‘grant’ rights to former slaves are burnt away again and again by de facto popular edict of the still-aggrieved former property owners who form Citizens’ Councils, Chambers of Commerce, National Rifle Associations, John Birch Societies, ‘Southern Strategies’, Suburban Watch Committees, Minute Men Border Vigilante groups, Tea Parties,and ALEC Councils to continually reassert their ownership rights over African Americans, and by extension over Natives, Women, Immigrants, and all people of color.

Thriving once again in the current environment of post democracy The Ghost in the Machine is deliberately and methodically fashioning for itself a resurgent post reconstruction atmospherecreated and manipulated by the ascendancy of what I call ‘Ready Reaction Groups’ such as The Tea Party, The National Citizens Action Network, the NRA, The Koch Brothers, Americans United for Life, The National Right to Work Committee, The American Civil Rights Institute,and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council—the lobby ‘action committee’ most responsible for pressuring and even authoring various reactionary corporate sponsored public legislation initiativesincluding the “Stand Your Ground” law). Eerily, the names worn by these groups, like pure white hoods, always cynically belie the groups’ true nature (“The National Right to Work Committee,” instrumental in the forming of ‘right to work’ laws attack unions, and deprive workers of living wages; similarly, the “Right to Life” movement seeks to protect the ‘lives’ only of the unborn, and supports legislative initiatives that literally threaten the lives of already born women).

It is not just Obama’s mediocre response to the Zimmerman verdict that is troubling, then, but Obama’s utter failure to offer anytrue, focused opposition (and by extension the Democratic Party’sfailure to offer opposition) to this ghost that seeks the end of Americandemocracy itself.

Trayvon Martin is becoming this era’s most nationally recognized, but only the latest, victim of resurgent racism enshrined inhistorio-typic, reactionary laws meant to again drag the nation backward to confront what it has yet to confront fully for coming up on 150 years in 2015: the reality of Black people as property. Theresurgent racism enabled by ALEC, is only one hooded face that the ghost shows.

The president’s responses so far to resurgent racism have been afaltering, calculated, Washington PR maneuver. His and his handlers’conscious beltway pandering to the base and to the left wing of hisDemocratic Party constituency is his method, not a presidential will that Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon displayed, rather than what history shows he needs to do now. In commentaries I’ve writtensince the verdict I’ve said in essence that I think he needs to take to the OVAL OFFICE and sit behind that Kennedy desk he has so proudly displays in images of himself making tough, strong presidential decisions. From that focal point, not from the press corps bullpen, he ought to declare his position on the erosion of African American human dignity and equal rights under the law in the same clear, un-garbled tone and tenacity he has at least verbally demonstrated in major statements of his determination to fight for the dignity and rights ofLGBT citizens and young ethnic citizens (‘the dreamers’ he calls them)who are the children of migrants and of immigrants.

​President Obama's remarks to the press corps days ago wereobfuscatory and halting, the demeanor he usually falls into when discussing racial justice, not just racial tolerance. When pressed by horrific racial events he sets his words on a trajectory of bathos rather than critique. In an era—the era of Obama’s presidency—that has seenSupreme Court decisions affecting reversals of Affirmative Action enforcement provisions, of African American voting rights, and of African American freedom from unreasonable search and seizure by the police, where was President Obama’s promise to safeguard the right of a young, Black citizen of this democracy to walk through his own father’s neighborhood with a bag of skittles? In an era that is arguably one of the most devastating for the future citizenship of African Americans, where was President Obama’s statement of his understanding of what really is at stake—the growing clash between White minority rights and the right to life and liberty for ALL Americans?

Never mind the ongoing battle in America by all Americans and particularly African Americans for consumer safety, medical resources, employment, and education; Obama’s administration presides over a moment in American history when the very citizenship of women and of people of color is being made ever more tenuous by powerful readyreaction groups such as the NRA and ALEC. It is worth recalling that even Richard Nixon took the step of forming a “Presidential Task Force on Women’s Rights,” and pursuant to their recommendations orderedhis justice department to bring sex discrimination suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Where is President Obama’s declaration ofintention, where is his presidential imprimatur on focused tactics, measures, plans for an executive order, or even another task force tothoroughly examine, diagnose, and change the vulnerability to reaction group influence, of fundamental apparatuses in the legislative process and in the criminal justice system that clearly are as culpable as Zimmerman’s gun in Trayvon Martin's death?

Where is Obama’s determination not just to 'look at' as he promises, the racist black codes such as the 'stand your ground' law, but to declare these black codes, all of them, once again unacceptable on their face, now in 2013 as much as they were in the 1800's? Where ishis promise to declare that Eric Holder is going to devote the fullweight and the power of the Justice Department of the United States to eradicating the proliferation of corporate sponsored anti-democratic public policy--isn't that exactly the Obamaesque 'teachable moment'that Obama has declined to use to teach democracy in this hislatest performance before the press? It may not be too late—his forays into public statements are slowly drawing closer to the oval office, but what has slowed him, and what is next? A confab on Black youth ‘gun violence’ with Chicago elected officials in the hallway outside of the oval office? A spontaneous Q&A at the Lincoln Memorial (location, location!) in which he carps, jibes, and guffaws freely with the press?

Those of us who saw the entire 39 minutes of the Press Corps remarks on C-SPAN are aware that my description is exactly what he went through before the more serious byte bits that the media carved out of the fracas of laughing shouts of ‘wake up people!,’ as he appeared and which included off color jokes about the “Detroit Troubles” as one pool reporter cracked. To a half empty press room he declared his desire to ‘expand on his earlier thoughts a little’ regarding Trayvon Martin.

Why no Air Force One flight to Miami Gardens to pay respect to the parents (not even the Vice President has time to go see them on Air Force Two?) Why hasn't the media been informed of the exact day and time Obama called the parents at least by phone to console them--these have always been the trappings of Obama's reaction to Whitedeaths, murders, and violence.

Not even a 'beer summit' for the parents of Trayvon Martin?
More concretely therefore, than my dislike of his avoidance of the real issues--race and it's embeddedness in the history of Americaand in the apparatuses of the justice system, is his steadfast determination to ignore the slow creep of reactionary lobby groups into the citizen process of the formation of laws. What has been andcontinues to be most deeply disappointing fact about our president is that he shows a clear bias toward Anglo victims of ‘gun violence’and against Black victims of racial violence, not because he is lacking in sympathy or awareness of the stakes (after all, he has just said, has he not, that Trayvon not only could be his son, but could be HIM?), but because he clearly, so far, has no intention of getting dirty the way Lyndon Johnson did by twisting arms, withholding favors, granting boons, and ultimately signing presidential orders. Instead, he said during his remarks, ‘the jury has spoken,’ and that his determination isto ‘leave the legal questions to the talking heads and to the legalexperts’(??) African Americans’ outrage, he assured the pool, is a reaction ‘to a history that doesn’t go away’ (he thus dismissed and diminished the material reality of continued oppressive laws as little more than African American ‘interpretation’ of the Trayvon Martin case; though he said African Americans are not necessarily naïve, he also said, ‘Black folks do interpret the violence due to a violent past”—not a violent present, it seems, other than the violence inside African American communities themselves).

His performance was an acrobatic twisting and doubling of issues to render them deliberately unfocused, obfuscated. Even if Martin's murder really were a mediocre continuation of the bathetic 'gun violence' trope Obama tries to characterize it as (which it isn't, it is more properly cognizable as a continuation of the endless victims tallied from the effects of white supremacy, police violence, and vigilante crimes carried out be everybody from mall cops to drugstore security guards to neighborhood watch freaks), there is a glaring lack in the president of the same effusive public weeping and agonizing over the parents and family left behind that he has evinced in the cases of other deaths by 'gun violence.' Not because he doesn’t feel it, we can conclude, but because he doesn’t want to do what most other truly progressive presidents sooner or later have been moved to do:take off the gloves, get into the ring, and slug it out with history, the history that put him in charge, gave him the tools, and leers at him through the ghost visage, not willing to concede a single thing without a demand—a demand he has yet to make on many fronts.
 


Rayfield A. Waller is a journalist and fiction writer. He was a past‘King/Parks/Chavez Visiting Instructor’ in Wayne State University’s Department of English in Detroit, and is currently on the adjunct faculty of Wayne State University’s Department of Africana Studies. He is a former commentator for the WAXY-AM Miami radio show, “Shock the System”, and is a contributing writer to The Michigan Citizen, to Miami’s bilingual journal, Progreso Weekly, to The Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan, and to various online Journals. 

Blogs:
rayfieldwaller.blogspot.com, reportfromdetroit.wordpress.com theblacklistpub.ning.com

Civil Rights Timeline:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html

‘Ready Reactionary’ Groups focused on destroying Democracy:
http://www.publiceye.org/research/directories/dem_grp_undermine.html

The ‘Reconstruction Amendments’:
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/CivilWarAmendments.htm

ISR Article on “The New War on Immigrants:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/43/minutemen.shtml

The de jure war on women:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/14/tavis-smiley-george-zimmerman-this-week_n_3594725.html

 TAVIS SMILEY

Tavis Smiley: George Zimmerman Verdict Evidence Of Society's 'Contempt' For Black Men
07/14/2013
HUFFINGTON POST

Tavis Smiley expressed his outrage at the George Zimmerman verdict on Sunday's "This Week," calling it evidence of society's "contempt" for black men.

Zimmerman was found not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin on Saturday. The news dominated the Sunday morning talk shows and prompted outrage from numerous media personalities, including Smiley, Al Sharpton and Chris Hayes.

"I think this is for many Americans, George, just another piece of evidence of the incontrovertible contempt that this nation often shows and displays for black men," Smiley said on ABC News' "This Week."

"Something is wrong in this nation, 50 years after the March on Washington... when adults can racially profile children," he continued. "Trayvon Martin was a child racially profiled and gunned down." Smiley added that in his own experience, most black people he knew had predicted that the verdict would turn out exactly as it did.

Panelist Dan Abrams said that there were two issues at hand, and that the question of "what is wrong with our society" was separate from "what happened in that courtroom."

"But every time we get to that nexus," Smiley interjected, "we never seem to accept the fact that race in this country is real, that color will get you killed and every time you have one of these cases... someone can always explain away why this person got off, why this person was not found guilty and what we have is a bunch of dead black men."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/16/tavis-smiley-im-waiting-to-hear-the-nra-say-if-trayvon-martin-had-a-gun-he-might-still-be-alive/

Tavis Smiley:   I’m waiting to hear the NRA say if Trayvon Martin had a gun, he might still be alive

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Radio host Tavis Smiley on Tuesday night warned there was an empathy gap between African Americans and white people in the United States.

“I say what’s missing in this conversation is the reality… that most whites are killed by other whites, most blacks are killed by other blacks,” he said on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. “That’s the bottom line. I say what is missing in this conversation is the reality that in this country, sadly, the life of a black child does not have the same worth and value as a white child.”

Smiley noted the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting resulted an outpouring of sympathy and sadness across the country. But the nation did not react in such a manner to the killing of black children, he said

“African Americans are not seeing that same kind of empathy and appreciation of the humanity of Trayvon that they saw for the children of Sandy Hook,” Smiley continued. “I’m waiting to hear, I haven’t heard it yet, I’m waiting to hear the NRA say that if Trayvon Martin had a gun, he might still be alive today. The bottom line is that race still the most intractable issue in this country, and when an adult can profile, and stalk and kill a child in America our democracy is threatened.”

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/221869

The King is Dead, No More Kings, Please: A Threnody for Michael Jackson

By Rayfield A. Waller

INTERROGATOR (Arab soldier)
My main man. Tell me something,
OK? What is problem with Michael
Jackson?

TROY (Black American soldier)
What do you mean?

INTERROGATOR:
The King of Pop. 'I'm bad, I'm
bad, you know it --'
Michael Jackson is Pop King of
sick country.

TROY:
Wrong.

[Troy is smashed in the face with the clip board by the interrogator. Blood drips
from his nose.]

INTERROGATOR:
Bullshit wrong, dude. A black man
make the skin white and the hair
straight. You know why?...Your sick
country make the black man hate hisself...

[from the film “Three Kings,” Screenplay by David O. Russell, 1998]

I meant to say nothing at all about the death of Michael Jackson, ‘King of Pop,” but now only twenty four hours after the news broke, and only five hours after the autopsy has been concluded and the coroner’s preliminary announcement that ‘more tests are needed before a cause of death can be determined,’ I’ve been convinced otherwise.

The LA coroner’s ‘more tests are needed’ is a long recognized code for ‘we might have another celebrity death caused by drug overdose here.’ While a snide undertone in coverage of Michael’s phenomenal talents, energies, and innovation is, predictably, starting to show through in the ironic smiles and crass humor of TV newsreaders. That undertone of contempt in Michael’s case, as in Richard Prior’s case before him, is for yet another dead Black performer’s ‘unfortunate flaws’ and ‘idiosyncrasies’.

Yet, as the above crib from the film, “Three Kings” implies, these very ‘flaws’ are endemic to the effects, of America’s film and music industry’s racism, on Black men and women who live inside the great meat grinder of the entertainment industry. The effects, if not the actual flaws (like Bird’s and Lady Day’s heroine addiction or Gil Scott Heron’s crack dependency), can be seen from Bill Cosby’s seething misanthropy disguised as humorous high jinks, to Will Smith’s obsessive-compulsive crossover mentality which leads him to do film after mundane film depicting Black men bent on ‘saving’ everyone (I Am Legend being the ultimate in that franchise), to Denzel Washington’s seeming inability to articulate anything culturally or politically critical and coherent in interviews other than his ceaselessly maudlin charity pitches, to Dave Chappell’s startling, self imposed exile from the same industry that had made him wealthy but clearly also had frightened him to the depths of his soul, to Oprah Winfrey’s manic agoraphilia and Angela Basset’s lonely crusade to hold onto her dignity against the misery and humiliation Halle Berry surrendered her body to in “Monster’s Ball” (Hollywood’s obligatory fetishisizing of the Black female body in proscribed, denigrating nude scenes, and prostitute, junkie, schoolmarm roles).

There is a familiar, racist double standard apparent in media voyeurism rather than any honest assessment of Michael’s talent. While Elvis’ physical addictions and psychological problems were and still are discussed in addition to his skills and his artistic significance, Michael’s shortcomings are treated as a negation of his expertise and historical genius.
This truculent lack of real or thoughtful context in both overt and slyly implied critiques of Michael’s sanity, his ‘morals,’ and his ‘self hatred’ (reflecting the sort of brazen contempt for his humanity that even the bloated, drug addled Elvis Presley, who did not have to suffer following his even more ignominious death at ‘Graceland’) has convinced me that I should write, to point out that lack of context. It only dehumanizes Michael to leave out that context, namely, America’s ferocious hatred of roots culture, of Black folk sources, and of the Afro-Soul origins that Michael drew from just as Sam Cook, and Ray Charles, and Al Green, and Cleavon Little, and Sammy Davis, and Bill Bojangles Robinson all had drawn from it. The hatred is equaled only by America’s simultaneous hunger for and desire to consume and exploit those sources, those roots.

The American entertainment industry is basically a public pillory, and no Black artist, no matter how rich and famous goes unscathed by the vicious duplicity of the industry’s failure to compensate Black artists equally, its subtle and gross humiliations of the Black image and disrespect for Black genius, its simultaneous praise and insult (and Michael, like so many brilliant Black performers, had grown toward the end to be no longer quite so rich, and less famous, more and more infamous). More and more over the coming days and weeks we will see it emerge: the implied, sometimes even literal smirk of ‘entertainment reporters’ and their sarcasm in mentioning Michael’s obvious psychoses, reflected in his peccadilloes with children, his addiction to Demerol and to plastic surgery, and his funny habits with elephant man bones, llamas, and Ferris wheels. That sarcasm—and the sublimated racism that it arises from, emerges as plain as the lack of a nose on Michael’s 49 year old face as these ghouls have been breaking the news of Michael’s death while transitioning into the sickening redundancy phase of their 72 hour news cycles, in which they will be re breaking and re breaking the news, shattering it, crunching it, and turning the shards into smithereens with relentless wall-to-wall coverage of the same old tired set pieces (here we are in front of the gates of the house where Michael died, the home he was renting in The Hollywood Hills that one or two ‘reporters’ have slipped up and referred to as ‘Neverland,’ an estate where Michael no longer lived; here we are in front of the coroner’s office; here we are in front of the Apollo theater where Al Sharpton belts out a spontaneous eulogy; now here we are back at the house again, still not ‘Neverland,’ and not located in ‘Brentwood’ as a dyslexic British reporter yammers, clearly reliving the heady days of the ‘OJ Affair’; always we are ‘out in front’, never inside, always fixedly gazing at a façade, as if meaning is about to emerge. but it never does; always we’re treated to a forest of microphone stands and to the same tired, chewed up looking cadre of ‘international journalists’ –i.e., glorified Paparazzi—droning on and on, and from the same Hollywood script at that).

The King, in short, is dead. But before the next Michael comes along to take his place in the public pillory of race, entertainment culture, and is chewed up and spat onto the plastic surgeon’s gurney, a few words from the REAL sponsor of the whole performance:

Even in this age in which Brittany Spears and Justin Timberlake announce their gratitude to Michael Jackson for providing the template they drew on to forge their careers, the abysmal ignorance of roots culture still motivates an equally abysmal disrespect for Blues, Jazz, Soul, and Hiphop, by implying for example that certain rap artists are taking their rap sensibility from popular mainstream film, television, and theater pieces like “Bring In Da Noise…” and that the monetary and psychic deprivation of Black artists like Michael can be lain at the doorstep of Motown (little by little, callow newsreaders and liberal talk show hosts are beginning to cite their freshly enlightened awareness of the injustice of the music industry through their single viewing of the single source, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” and the story of The Funk Brothers).

At the time of its 1990’s premiere of course, “Bring In Da Noise” was in fact, widely regarded in uptown Manhattan, in Detroit, Philly, LA, and Cleveland, as a bastardization of African American step art-dance, of Brooklyn radio-chant, and of James Brown-to-Ohio Players-to-Cameo-to-Jungle Bothers Black Funk roots culture. A lot of Black people across the country (Detroit, Chicago, Oakland, LA, Philly, etc.), not just in New York (Harlem, Bed Stuy, Bronx, ‘Strong’ Island, etc.) were sickened whenever we saw such drivel advertised incessantly on TV and Gods help us, even traveling throughout the country busting up into our communities, bringing out the corny white suburbanites who cruised into the theater districts under police guard to vicariously experience urban culture.

“…Funk…” is symbolic of many derivative cultural products manufactured in America, from minstrelsy to burlesque to John Phillip Sousa to Al Jolson, from Bing Crosby to Vaudeville to Elvis to Jerry Lee Lewis to Dinah shore to Madonna to Justin Timberlake. The simulacrum comes to be considered to be original (*groan*), not derivative, not a rip-off of the rural slave and urban wage-slave and Black street culture that it really is. Such theft feels to Black artists and writers like “Miss Saigon” must have felt to Asian Americans. The idea that the simulacrum is becoming the original is actually a sentiment which is gaining force in the culture right now with Hiphop just as it did earlier in the twentieth century with Jazz (by 1970 many Americans were convinced Jazz was a white art form courtesy of Benny Goodman, just as by 1950 they’d been convinced that Rock and Roll was invented by Jerry Lee Lewis).

I hung out with white cultural critic, Eric Lott (author of ‘Love and Theft’) when he was visiting the University of Miami a few years ago when I was an English professor there, and he remarked that he found it frightening how the culture was redefining cultural theft of Black art forms as ‘anti-racist’, ‘integrationist’ and progressive gestures, while simultaneously defining critiques of this long standing American crime as ‘racist’ (in other words, the victim who complains of being victimized is the real troublemaker here). To my dismay and my alarm, I ‘ve been noticing over the years while teaching at U Miami, FIU, at Barry University, and now at Wayne State University in Detroit, that my students have no idea that the white pop artists they love are actually culturally cleansed imitations of people like Aretha Franklin, Barry White, and Martha and the Vandellas (60’s and 70’s Black pop icons) via Peabo Bryson, Whitney Houston, Sister Sledge, and Anita Baker (the 80’s Black pop icons) and then later Bobby Brown, Ready for the World, Queen Latifah, and Roxanne Shante (the 90’s Black pop Icons). Sadly, they not only don’t know who Martha and the Vandellas are; they haven’t even been exposed to Queen Latifah! (They think she’s an actress, if they ever heard of her at all). Eminem (who is actually a quite talented Marshall Mathers underneath the candy coating) is only the latest evolution of an undeniable and inevitable process of taking rap, funk, and Hiphop away from African American roots sources, and culturally cleansing it (Backstreet Boys, Shakira, Brittany Spears, et al).

Not long after Lott had finished his visiting lecture at U Miami I was amazed to see in the Miami Herald (Sun Jan 19, 2003, Herald, pg. 9M, by Herald Music critic, Evelyn Mcdonnell), an article on composer Jon Larson, author of “Rent”, that mentioned the touring show, “Bring Da Noise,” while criticizing Hiphop impresario, Russell Simmons. The article featured the headline, “Copycats getting accolades for their predecessors’ creativity” as well as a caption beneath a photo of a white minstrel figure and a Black B Boy (‘Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam’ takes its cues from Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk’). This sort of thing creates the impression that Jon Larson is an originator of Black urban Hiphop culture while Russell Simmons is an imitator getting rich off Larson’s art. The photo of the white minstrel figure and the Black B Boy figure reinforced this fallacious idea, because the juxtaposition of the photos made it seem as if Larson IS the white originator (the ‘white negro’ as it were) and that the Black B Boy figure is Russell Simmons. This is a typical kind of visual and semiotic distortion engaged in by unconscious editors.

On closer reading, the article was not really even about what the head announces—rather it was an homage to Jon Larson. The article carefully draws a distinction between Larson and the “Bring Da Noise…” ilk, and furthermore it attempts to do a subtle critique of those within the hiphop movement who profit off hiphop’s whitewashing. Yet, even such a rare thing as a major daily critic writing a piece approaching the entertainment industry critically and analytically, is erased by the inevitable meat grinder of context (heads and captions carry on their own discourse which is gleefully oblivious of the point being made by the author).

There is in fact a sub genre of pop music criticism that positions Russell Simmons as somehow being an outsider to the Hiphop movement when in fact he was right there at the founding along with Cool Moe Dee, DJ Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Eric B and Rakim, Mel-Mel, and all the rest—even Fab Five Freddie, clown that he was, was indisputably in the creative core of the music’s origins, and hell, I know close friends of some of these people, and I know that Russell paid dues, and did in fact economically support the music and support some of these artists in the 80’s). The positioning of such a crucial figure, however commercialized, as an outsider and imitator while positioning Larson as an originator, was galling to me, and far too representative of the backward notions of American Kulture.

The article, finally, offers a coherent defense of the Newyoricans poets’ movement of the 80’s and 90’s. Yet, this gesture’s meaning is lost in the appending of this portion to the larger issue of Larson. Thus are the sins of journalism: shallow treatment, hapless captioning, lack of historical detail and clarity. The article would have been decisively more credible had it been more clear and direct. When I called an editor at the Herald to ask why more figures within the movement were not mentioned, such as Pedro Pietri (“The Masses Are Asses”), I was refused access to even the voice mail of Evelyn Mcdonnell. Emails I wrote to her were never acknowledged, and I have no idea if they reached her. Ultimately, I felt, Mcdonnell was trying to say something in that piece about art and CLASS identity, transcending race: that the urban movements of the 80’s (which included Hiphop but also included the Newyorican school, urban chic movements, the poetics revival of the St. Marks Poetry Project, which I once did a reading for) fed into some of the off-off Broadway rebirth that gave us “Angels In America” (that Jon Larson can be contextualized by the new poetics of the 80’s). That multiculturalism is exactly what Hiphop began as in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The promise of all this cultural genesis was destroyed by the hijacking of Hiphop carried out by record companies and by individual Black thugs who gave us so-called ‘gangsta rap’ in the 90’s.

In an early 2003 NPR interview of Hershey Felder (who played George Gershwin a one-man theatrical piece which toured in the early 90’s) Felder recounted how Gershwin encountered Maurice Ravel and wanted to study with him, and Ravel admonished him by saying, ‘why would you want to be a second rate Ravel when you are a first rate Gershwin’? And indeed, Gershwin was little appreciated or understood in his lifetime, despite great commercial success. He was under appreciated as an ARTIST. People like Dvorak, Ravel, and Stravinsky would come to America, and would wonder why Americans were so far behind in understanding and appreciating AMERICAN musical forms as they themselves DID (the Blues, R&B, Soul, Rock and Roll, etc.) I have taught two very important books in the past few years. One is called “Blues People” by Leroi Jones, and the other is “The Death of Rhythm and Blues” by Nelson George. I once talked with Jones (Baraka) when he did a reading at Cornell University in the early 90’s, where I was a graduate student, and I got to talk with Nelson in the late 80’s when he visited Cornell. Both Nelson and Baraka mentioned Jon in conversation as a figure of importance in a multivariate, energetic, and far too brief period of American working class urban culture, which Americans have yet to take seriously or understand.

But then, they still have not really dealt seriously with figures such as Irving Berlin, Hoagie Carmichael, Gershwin, Sondheim, or for that matter, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus. I know that my students have never even heard of most of these people. It’s a sad state of affairs, since the rest of the world knows and loves all these people I have mentioned. Perhaps this is one reason the rest of the world dislikes Americans so much. We have so many riches, yet seem not to care about it or show any gratitude for being so blessed.

And the death of a Michael Jackson becomes just another occasion to sell soap with the promotion of spectacle, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity being presented by the event of his death, to examine the historical, political,and cultural context of his life, in all its glory and all its pain.

May he rest.