SATURDAY,
that friend i was talking about, adam banks, teach rhetoric
here at syracuse, one of keiths folk, askd me to be on that
wright panel, i wrote back somewhat snarly that ima
pass man, i applaud the effort but im trhu w/rwright,
and i aint gon give no noveltime to a sideshow ...
(im in the woodshed now, no discretionary time no where)
this what he wrote back
pulling my coat when im
in no mood to listen
message received
acknowledged
check
-----------------------------
i hear you on that. seems to be the dominant read on him. trying to
see all sides, though, i can't just brush him off like that. the bill
moyers interview and the press club talk (before the Q/A session) were
carefully thought out, well put together, and even conciliatory toward
whitefolk and the nation in a lot of ways. even the naacp speech had a
lot of that in it too.
the naacp speech was trying to challenge the naacp to have some
backbone and really step past its old boojie semi activism. he even
said that he supported obama in that speech (though he did it in
veiled language to keep the naacp from having the IRS on their
behinds). politically, i cant see why he would build with the naacp
and their footdragging scared politics of the last 30,40 years if his
intent was to take down his boy.
i don't blame him for either of those goals. the Q/A at the press
club is where it bordered on farce, and that pissed me off too, but
that could easily be one of those moments where he just failed.
intended to go in there lucid, thoughtful, and just lost his mind when
he saw the foolishness of how they came at him (foolishness he should
have known to expect, of course). guess im sayin there's a difference
between trying to do right and messin up vs. just egotrippin from jump.
only reason im willing to try to read it a lil different is that he
did lay low for a long time and let obama do his thing even though
obama really did do him wrong in how he handled the
"denounce/repudiate" stuff after the first go round--a go round in
which the supposedly worst quotes werent even from wright but wright
quoting an ambassador in iraq.
guess i dont see wright as quite the same as the old black left
either. nor do i think he was charging obama with pushing the left
line--matterfact, most of the black left laid low once they saw obama
having a real chance (like cornel changed his tune).
i think it was definitely ill advised, bad timing, and all of that,
but i guess im willing to read the situation and him a little
differently. the man had a hit put out on his character, nobody was
willing to step out there for him the first time, *and* he watched the
same hit go down on obama's campaign in PA--the isht that billary and
her people did to obama in PA is exactly the same thing they did to
wright the first time, and tried to do to obama by going after wright.
he might have just had one of those enough is enough moments, and
handled some of it poorly. if it looked to him, like it looked to a
lot of people that this thing was done in PA, that billary and her
folks worked the backroom deals that were going to get her the
nomination, and seeing himself torn down in the process, i dont know,
i think that would be enough to make a lot of people step out there,
and that it wouldnt be all ego.
only real problem is that wright should have peeped his boy's cards,
since he made it a point to praise him (talkin bout farrakhan).
farrakhan got 20-30 years experience knowing that some fights with the
american media are no win situations, you aint gonna be heard, and you
gonna be intentionally misinterpreted anyway (like the gov't and AIDS
comment--of course he never said the gov't had anything to do with it,
just that a lot of people who look at what happened with tuskegee, and
with AIDS drug trials being misrepresented in south africa, would say
that its at least possible. and we know that aint how it was reported).
so anyway, long story short, i feel you on the read, and feel a lot of
the frustration you bringing. matterfact, at least two of the folk on
the panel are bringing just about the exact same read as yours. i
just think there's more to the story that the rest of us aint gonna
know for a good long time. hard left politics or not, i think
jeremiah been committed and in the fight way too long to come out and
intentionally do a drive by on his boy just to get some spotlight.
guess we'll see sooner or later....
as for the program tomorrow, i aint pushing no one way of reading it
though, was just trying to make sure that we got a space to think it
through together without having to rely on these wackass media
outlets. cause even if you right, its a major moment for blackfolk
and the political process, and one where we got to ask how we want to
deal with it.
thanks for considerin it though. you know i appreciate your wisdom on
these things.
ab
----------------------------
FRIDAY MORNING
hello world, buddy of mine is hosting a forum on rev wright
i should go but that hurt me so much i believe ima pass
wrights timing is so bad i got no slack in my heart for him
dont want to hear no reasoned debate - waste of noveltime
im thru w/him, aint giving no more
time to a sideshow
got boy obama in a crouch, taking fire from hillary and her colored minions, wright and the hard black left, mccain and the republicans, racists crawling out from under rocks
mccain and the racists, well thats just the way it is, but hillary and wright hurt
i shouldnt post damn near this entire article about hillarys use of racism
her willingness to violate everything shes stood for in progressive politics
this politics of resentment shes fanned will poison relations for years
im just noting his vulnerabilities she say - im not actually using them
like them republicans would, im just pointing them out, again and again
folk say obama got this far cause he black deluded
got this far because he bringing what america need
a new politic, a higherground - this longgame
this the nature of struggle in the 21st century
providing a new way, an african american way
a higher ground to which others aspire
clueless dinosaurs like wright best get up to speed
the game is on
hard left just as problematic as the hard right
and hillary has just scratched the surface
of the racism this campaign will unleash
hillary has fanned the dogs of war
but if obama cant handle hillary, cant handle mccain, how
he gon handle putin, mugabe, osama
carville say if hillary was to give obama one of her cojones they would
both have two - boy obama gon have to learn how to work w/both hands
clinton buy into bully america, just as determined as bush
was to prove how tough she can be, how rough she play
okay, i give it to her, she play
rough, she play real rough - but
subtle she is not, and if the nomination get took by such venal means, ima have
to sit it out, cant support that, can reward that
i suspect my little vote dont mean nothing to them, but
it mean something to me -
if blackfolk sit it out and the repubs win, (or worse the
dems win without us) we got to be ready to take a punch
i suggest the passions unleashed by obamas run have yet to play out
i believe its gon get ugly, i believe the hurting has just begun
everybody gon need to throw down on this
one, everybody gon have to do they part
i believe times about to get hard o regulators
obama win obama lose, we bout to go thru the fire
word by rickydoc trickmaster
wouldbe prophet of
the hoodoo way
in the name of
the conqueror
get your game on
-----------------------
from article in nation by betsy reed called: race to the bottom
Yet what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications
for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her
rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior
"electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and
sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are
entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black,
too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety
about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political
strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned
Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has
presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many
nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.
While 2008 was never going to be a "postracial" campaign, the early
racially tinged skirmishes between the Clinton and Obama camps seemed
containable. There were references by Clinton campaign officials to
Obama's admission of past drug use; the tit-for-tat over Clinton's
tone-deaf but historically accurate statement that Martin Luther King
needed Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights dreams to be realized; and
insinuations that Obama is a token, unqualified, overreaching--that he's
all pretty words, "fairy tales" and no action.
From the point of view of Obama's supporters, the edge was taken off
some of these conflicts by the mere fact of his stunning electoral
success, built as it was on significant white support. Melissa
Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and African-American studies at
Princeton and an Obama volunteer, recalls that for black Americans "Iowa
was an astonishing moment--watching Barack win the caucus felt like
Reconstruction. There was something powerful about feeling as though you
were a full citizen." In democracy, Harris-Lacewell explains, "the ruled
and rulers are supposed to be the same people. The idea that black folks
could be engaged in the process of being rulers over not just black
folks but over the nation as a whole struck me as very powerful."
Soon enough, however, that powerful idea came under attack.
"More than any single thing, that moment with Bill Clinton in South
Carolina represents the rupture that was coming," says Harris-Lacewell.
The moment occurred in late January, when the former President compared
Obama's landslide win, in which he received a major boost from
African-American voters, to Jesse Jackson's victories there in 1984 and
1988. Because the former President offered the comparison unprompted, in
response to a question that had nothing to do with Jackson or race, the
statement was widely read as chalking up Obama's win to his blackness
alone and thus attempting to marginalize him as a doomed minority
candidate with limited appeal. Obama was now "the black candidate," in
the words of one Clinton strategist quoted by the AP.
By March, multiple videos of Wright, Obama's former pastor, had popped
up on YouTube and had begun to play on an endless loop in the right-wing
media. "God damn America for treating your citizens as less than human,"
Wright inveighed, reciting a litany of racial complaints. And he said in
his sermon immediately following 9/11, "America's chickens are coming
home to roost."
According to Smith College professor Paula Giddings, author of a new
biography of Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword Among Lions and the Campaign
Against Lynching, Wright's angry invocation of race and nation
tapped into a reservoir of doubt about the very Americanness of
African-Americans. "American citizenship has always been racialized as
white. Who is a true American? Are African-Americans true Americans?
That has been the question," she says.
In Obama's case--given his mixed-race lineage, his Kenyan father, his
experiences growing up in Indonesia, his middle name
(Hussein)--questions about his devotion to America carry a special
potency, as xenophobia mingles with racism to create a poisonous brew.
The toxicity is further heightened in this post-9/11 atmosphere, in
which an image of Obama in Somali dress is understood as a slur and
e-mails claiming that he is a "secret Muslim" schooled in a madrassa
spread virally, along with rumors that he took the oath of office on a
Koran. The madrassa and Koran canards have been thoroughly debunked, but
still they persist--and few have been willing to stand up and say, So
what if he was a Muslim? For her part, Clinton, asked on 60
Minutes whether Obama was a Muslim, said, "There is nothing to base
that on, as far as I know."
Giddings calls the Wright association a "litmus test" that Obama must
pass, saying, "It will be interesting to see if a man of color, a man
who's cosmopolitan, can be the quintessential symbol of America" as its
President.
Obama initially responded to that challenge with his speech in
Philadelphia on March 18. While condemning Wright's words, he placed
them in a historical context of racial oppression and said, "I can no
more disown him than I can disown the black community." (More recently,
of course, Obama did renounce him.) But in the Philadelphia speech,
called "A More Perfect Union," Obama also outlined a racially universal
definition of American citizenship and affirmed his commitment to
represent all Americans as President. "I chose to run for the presidency
at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve
the challenges of our time unless we solve them together--unless we
perfect our union by understanding that we have different stories, but
we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have
come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same
direction."
A mere three days after Obama spoke those words, Bill Clinton made this
statement in North Carolina about a potential Clinton-McCain general
election matchup: "I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election
year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to
the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves
who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that
always seems to intrude itself on our politics." Whether or not this
statement constituted McCarthyism, as one Obama surrogate alleged and as
Clinton supporters vigorously denied, the timing of the remark made its
meaning quite clear: controversies relating to Obama's race render him
less fit than either Hillary or McCain to run for president as a
patriotic American. A couple of weeks later, Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen went so far as to call on Obama to make another
speech, modeled after John F. Kennedy's declaration in 1960 that,
despite his Catholicism, he would respect the separation of church and
state as President--as though Obama's blackness were a sign of
allegiance to some entity, like the Vatican, other than the United
States of America.
In the Democratic debates, enabled by the moderators, Hillary Clinton
has increasingly deployed issues of race and patriotism as a wedge
strategy against her opponent. First, in the debate in Cleveland on
February 26, she pressed Obama not only to denounce but to reject Louis
Farrakhan--to whom he was spuriously linked through Reverend Wright, who
had taken a trip with the black nationalist leader in the 1980s. In
style as well as content, that attack was a harbinger of things to come.
In the most recent debate, ABC's George Stephanopolous and Charles
Gibson peppered Obama with questions such as, "Do you believe [Wright]
is as patriotic as you are?" and, regarding former Weatherman Bill
Ayers, a Chicago neighbor and Obama supporter, "Can you explain that
relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won't be a
problem?" Time after time, Clinton picked up the line and ran with it.
"You know, these are problems, and they raise questions in people's
minds. And so this is a legitimate area...for people to be exploring and
trying to find answers," she said, seeming to abandon her argument that
these issues are fair game now only because they will be raised by
Republicans later and thus are relevant to an evaluation of Obama's
electability.
The Wright, Farrakhan and Ayers controversies have been fueled by a
craven media, and ABC's performance in the debate has rightly been
condemned. But given that Clinton is the one who is running for
President and who purports to represent liberal ideals, her complicity
in such attempts to establish guilt by association is far more
troubling. While she has dealt gingerly with the matter of Wright in the
wake of his recent appearance at the National Press Club--accusing
Republicans of politicizing the issue--she also took pains to remind
reporters that she "would not have stayed in that church under those
circumstances."
It's disappointing, to say the least, to see the first viable female
contender for the presidency participate in attacks on her black
opponent's patriotism, which exploit an anxious climate around national
security that gives white men an edge both over women and people of
color--who tend to be viewed, respectively, as weak and potentially
traitorous. Says Paula Giddings, "This idea of nationalism and
patriotism pulling at everyone has demanded hypermasculine men, more
like McCain than the feline Obama, and demanded women whose role is to
be maternal more than anything else."
For Hillary Clinton, the gendered terrain of post-9/11 national security
politics has been treacherous indeed. As Elizabeth Drew observed in
The New York Review of Books, Clinton took steps in the Senate,
like joining the Armed Services Committee, "to protect herself from the
sexist notion that a woman might be soft on national security." As a
2002 study by the White House Project, a women's leadership group,
found, "Women candidates start out with a serious disadvantage--voters
tend to view women as less effective and tough. Recent events of war,
terrorism, and recession have only...increased the salience of these
dimensions." Clinton has been quite successful in allaying these
concerns, although she faces a Catch-22: her reputed toughness and
ruthlessness have helped ratchet up her high negatives. The White House
Project study found that a woman candidate faces a unique tension
between the need to show herself "in a light that is personally
appealing, while also showing that she has the kind of strength needed
for the job she is seeking."
Of course, Clinton's decision to play the hawk may have had other
motivations. Perhaps she really believed that voting to authorize the
war in Iraq was the right thing to do (which is, arguably, even more
worrying). But her posture in this campaign--threatening to "totally
obliterate" Iran after being asked how she would respond in the highly
improbable event of an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel, for
example--has at least something to do with a desire to compete on a
macho foreign policy playing field. It's the woman in this Democratic
primary race who has the cowboy swagger: the nationalist and
militaristic rhetoric, the whiskey-swilling photo-ops, the gotcha
attacks for perceived insults to a working-class electorate (as in
"Bittergate") that is usually depicted as white and male.
Clinton has, to be sure, faced a raw misogyny that has been more out in
the open than the racial attacks on Obama have been. But while sexism
may be more casually accepted, racism, which is often coded, is more
insidious and trickier to confront. Clinton's response to "Iron my
shirt" was immediate and straightforward: "Oh, the remnants of sexism,
alive and well." Says Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor at
Columbia and UCLA and executive director of the African American Policy
Forum, "While sexism can be denounced more directly, that doesn't mean
it's worse. Things that are racist have yet to be labeled and understood
as such."
While on occasion Obama's campaign has complained of racial slights,
Obama himself has avoided raising the charge directly. Even so, Clinton
supporters make the twisted claim that it is Obama who has racialized
the campaign. "While promoting Obama as a 'post-racial' figure, his
campaign has purposefully polluted the contest with a new strain of what
historically has been the most toxic poison in American politics," wrote
Sean Wilentz in The New Republic in an article titled "Race Man."
Bill Clinton recently groused that the Obama camp, in the controversy
over his Jackson remark, "played the race card on me."
As for the way the Clinton campaign has dealt with race, Crenshaw says,
"It started with a small drumbeat, but as the campaign has proceeded, as
Hillary has taken part in things, more people are really seeing this as
a 'line in the sand' kind of moment."
Among the black feminists interviewed for this article, reactions to the
declarations of sexism's greater toll by Clinton supporters--and their
demand that all women back their candidate out of gender solidarity,
regardless of the broader politics of the campaign--ran the gamut from
astonishment to dismay to fury. Patricia Hill Collins, a sociology
professor at the University of Maryland and author of Black Feminist
Thought, recalls how, before they were reduced to their race or
gender, the candidates were not seen solely through the prism of
identity, and many Democrats were thrilled with the choices before them.
But of the present, she says, "It is such a distressing, ugly period.
Clinton has manipulated ideas about race, but Obama has not manipulated
similar ideas about gender." This has exacerbated longstanding racial
tensions within the women's movement, Collins notes, and is likely to
alienate young black women who might otherwise have been receptive to
feminism. "We had made progress in getting younger black women to see
that gender does matter in their lives. Now they are going to ask, What
kind of white woman is Hillary Clinton?"
The sense of progress unraveling is profound. "What happened to the
perspective that the failures of feminism lay in pandering to racism, to
everyone nodding that these were fatal mistakes--how is it that all that
could be jettisoned?" asks Crenshaw, who co-wrote a piece with Eve
Ensler on the Huffington Post called "Feminist Ultimatums: Not in Our
Name." Crenshaw says that, appalled as she is by the sexism toward
Clinton, she found herself stunned by some of the arguments pro-Hillary
feminists were making. "There is a myopic focus on the aspiration of
having a woman in the White House--perhaps not any woman, but it
seems to be pretty much enough that she be a Democratic woman." This
stance, says Crenshaw, "is really a betrayal."
Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice,
attributes this go-for-broke attitude to the mindset of corporate
feminism. "There's a way in which feminists who have been seriously
engaged in electoral politics for a long time, the institutional DC
feminist leadership, they are just with Hillary Clinton come hell or
high water. I think they have accepted, as she has accepted, a similar
career trajectory. They are not uncomfortable with what has gone on in
the campaign, because they see electoral campaigns as mere instruments
for getting elected. This is just the way it is. We have to get
elected."
The implications of all this for the future of feminism depend
significantly on the outcome of the primary, says Kissling. "If Clinton
wins, the older-line women's movement will continue; it will be a
continuation of power for them. If she doesn't win, it will be a death
knell for those people. And that may be a good thing--that a younger
generation will start to take over."
Many younger women, indeed, have responded to the admonishments of their
pro-Hillary second-wave elders by articulating a sophisticated political
orientation that includes feminism but is not confined to it. They may
support Obama, but they still abhor the sexism Clinton has faced. And
they detect--and reject--a tinge of sexism among male peers who have
developed man-crushes on the dashing senator from Illinois. "Even while
they voice dismay over the retro tone of the pro-Clinton feminist whine,
a growing number of young women are struggling to describe a gut
conviction that there is something dark and funky, and probably not so
female-friendly, running below the frantic fanaticism of their
Obama-loving compatriots," wrote Rebecca Traister in Salon.
It's not just young feminists who have taken such a nuanced view.
Calling themselves Feminists for Peace and Obama, 1,500 prominent
progressive feminists--including Kissling, Barbara Ehrenreich and this
magazine's Katha Pollitt--signed on to a statement endorsing him and
disavowing Clinton's militaristic politics. "Issues of war and peace are
also part of a feminist agenda," they declared.
In some sense, this is a clarifying moment as well as a wrenching one.
For so many years, feminists have been engaged in a pushback against the
right that has obscured some of the real and important differences among
them. "Today you see things you might not have seen. It's clearer now
about where the lines are between corporate feminism and more
grassroots, global feminism," says Crenshaw. Women who identify with the
latter movement are saying, as she puts it, "'Wait a minute, that's not
the banner we are marching under!'"
Feminist Obama supporters of all ages and hues, meanwhile, are hoping
that he comes out of this bruising primary with his style of politics
intact. While he calls it "a new kind of politics," Clinton and Obama
are actually very similar in their records and agendas (which is perhaps
why this contest has fixated so obsessively on their gender and race).
But in his rhetoric and his stance toward the world outside our borders,
Obama does appear to offer a way out of the testosterone-addled GOP
framework. As he said after losing Pennsylvania, "We can be a party that
thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and
act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a
tactic and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes. Or we can decide
that real strength is asking the tough questions before we send our
troops to fight."
As comedian Chris Rock quipped, Bush "fucked up so bad that he's made it
hard for a white man to run for President." Rock spoke too soon: many
are hungry for a shift, but the country needs the right push to get
there. Unfortunately, from Hillary Clinton, it's getting a shove in the
wrong direction.
----------------------
couldnt have said that no better myself
in struggle
rdoc
THURSDAY MORNING
well well well
hillary operatives in dc, organization called womens voices womens votes
using robocalls in north carolina to supress black vote
busted by a local nonprofit that traced anonymous calls when
black residents protested misleading information
suppressing the black vote is a political felony
kinda like putting nelson mandela on the terrorist watch list
mistake says washington, congress vows to fix it
may 3rd declared nyc day of absence behind sean bell case
rioting passe, blackfolk try a no spend boycott
likely to fail but what the hell
a luta continua - more or less
rdoc
WEDNESDAY 4:01 AM
hello world, last class yesterday, ima free man
usually i just crash for a week or so but im so desperate
i hope i hit the ground running
look here i aint gon say i told you so
but who let rev wright out
what possess him to step out now
some say the hard black left gunning for obama
in a war for the hearts and souls of blackfolk
some say the reverend wright just a gloryhound in
love with the sound of his voice
some say he a plant for clinton, well okay maybe not him
but the folk giving him play (who is this barabara reynolds)
i say he took his eyes off the prize
i credit him for the service trinity has provided
the right reverend has his role to play in the struggle
but warrior need to know when to come strong when to lay low
not your moment man, aint about you
forgive him lord, he know not what he do
not a clue
let me put this next post under human interest maybe
the turtle above was run over by a car
nursed back to health by a good samaritan except for
that crushed leg - so he was given a set of wheels
i enjoyed posting that
im outta here, rest or work
either one count as
rest for the weary
speaking of which, a nyfa in fiction, a vote of confidence just when i need
it, i forgot i applied, one of those spur of the moment things, today nyfa
tomorrow a mac, im
burning a candle
all my love
rdoc
lets move to a higher plane:
killing and rampaging, this really distress me
speaking of work, toni morrison 
also good news the louisiana dem the repubs targeted
save you more than that holiday tax, okay
this is detail from altar he did libation in
that have been inflicted on the democrats, who have gotten this far by splitting the democrats on race, its just amazing
got me a literary cat, serenity is her name
never know how my rootsblog posts will respond during woodshed, i generally
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