There is a recommended diary right now, Coffee with Dad that I wrote a comment to.
Well, it started out as a comment. But it didn't stop there, because it couldn't. So I kept writing, since my need to try and help the author understand where I'm coming from kept getting in the way of succinctness and brevity. Suffice it to say that I could not accept the author's apologies -- of which there were several -- about her father's words. But my inability to do so it not because of her father's words.
They -- her father's words -- were honest and I don't expect or want people to apologize for honesty, in themselves or others. I cannot accept the apology because of the dishonesty (with herself and, thus, with me) of the diarist's views -- although I suspect that many will claim that she was sincere in their protestations about her father's racism and the lack of her own (and they'd be right about her sincerity, I don't doubt), without really searching their souls and thinking about what I have to say. Or what people like Tim Wise have tried to say to us all about the insidious unconsciousness of anti-Black racism and how it plays out no matter what political stripe someone is. Tried but have failed to persuade most of the white majority that needs to get it, and get it fast, as it seriously contemplates for the first time deliberately voting for a Black person for President (as opposed to almost accidentally, such as with Jesse Jackson's success in 1988.)
What I wanted to say to the diarist as a comment, which became a diary, was this: I was appreciative of her putting up her diary - it must be difficult to hold one's own parents up to the microscope in such a harsh way, when it is clear that he's her dad and thus, a "good guy".
Because I do appreciate such things, I am going to be candid as well. I will hope she and others will take that candor in the spirit is offered, much the way I hoped when I wrote my first diary here at Daily KOS in November, 2004.
My comments relate to this part of the diary:
He said well, he thinks Obama would further a "black agenda" and I said "what's that?" He said, oh you know, more affordable housing, which black people would tear up and destroy, and more welfare. I sort of rolled my eyes and said "Dad...........Barack and Michelle Obama both have advanced degrees and are bigtime overachievers...........do you really think they have a lot of sympathy for people that take advantage of the welfare system and tear up affordable housing?"
I said, in my view, Barack Obama would be to the kind of people he is talking about, sort of like a "Nixon goes to China" thing...........if anything, they would be totally against that sort of thing.
He said "sort of like Bill Cosby" I said yeah exactly.
Barack Obama and I are the same age, born in the same month. We both were blessed with the opportunity to obtain a blue-blood education. We are both graduates of elite institutions of learning, and both attorneys at law. Both of us have been lecturers at equally elite law schools. We've both been "community organizers" (I still am). We’ve both been public officials. We both have made a decent living as adults although it seems that neither one of us tried to go for the golden egg of partnership at a large commercial law firm, something that our educations gave us a small chance at (most Black lawyers no matter how gifted do not remain at elite firms for very long, but that is a discussion for another time). We also both speak excellent King’s English (although I do so only when it is necessary to communicate effectively, not that it is most of the time outside of the professional or cross-racial world; that’s what code switching is for). About the only meaningful difference in our resumes, really, is that (a) both of my parents are Black, from slave and sharecropping lineage; (b) I have declined all offers to be a politician over the 2 decades since it was first suggested to me by some well- meaning folks, except for a brief stint in the CA Central Committee before I got sick and tired of the BS (whereas Barack Obama has thrived on politics and being a politician for some time); and (c) I was raised in the urban Black ghetto by my working-class, later poor, Black parents – even though they separated when I was a teen -- whereas Barack Obama was raised in the ‘burbs in Hawa’ii by his mother and later (white) grandparents for most of his childhood, except for when he was living in Indonesia with his mother.
In other words, I have an enormous amount in common with Barack Obama – another Black person, like it or not -- when it comes to all the measures that really mean anything in this life, except for (a) where I was born and raised; (b) the color of the folks that raised me and (c) the economic conditions in which we were reared.
I would never EVER think or feel any of the things that the diarist told her father -- without citing any evidence, mind you-- Barack and Michelle Obama might likely feel about some Black people. My slave-born great-grandparents (all but one of them was born before 1863) would rise up out the grave and rightfully have my soul forfeit for such a thing.
So what exactly underlie the diarist's conclusion that Barack and/or Michelle Obama would feel differently than I do about "those people" who the diarist was discussing with her father?
That’s not a rhetorical question, believe it or not. IMO, answering that question is important. For our country, if Barack Obama is to actually succeed as President of a unified America, assuming he is in fact elected.
IMO, the sentiments the diarist used to "sell" her Dad on Barack Obama as a Black man running for president are racist. Each of the examples she made to her father about the "differences" of Barack Obama is grounded in a deeply negative, anti-Black stereotype. The fact that they were not "get a rope" lynching stereotypes does not change their nature. They reflect the post-civil rights movement social compact which substituted newfangled polite left-wing anti-Black racism (code) for her dad's far more honest (and therefore far easier for Black folks who actually love Black folks to deal with, as my parents often said once they left the South in the 1950’s) right-wing anti-Black racism.
Let me explain why I feel this way. Hopefully folks will hear me out and push their own thinking a bit.
I start with the most basic, and glaring failure in what the diarist said to her father. She apologized for her father, calling him racist. Yet she did not take the opportunity to tell her father he was flat out wrong about the facts underlying his beliefs. Which he is. Most Black people do not live in "affordable housing", let alone "affordable housing" built by the government or by tax funds. Most folks that do live in government-sponsored housing don't "tear it up". And most Black folks don't live on welfare. All those beliefs are Reagan-era white supremacist MYTH which used to be Herbert Hoover MYTH and so on and so forth all the way back to Reconstruction. Despite their status as cherished cultural myth, these types of sentiments are false icons: at best, they are descriptions of a small minority of Black folks -- like they would be of a small minority of white folks -- and are decidedly the exception in most Black people’s lives that, like crime and drugs. Yet they nonetheless always manage to stay on the front page of the news in a country where most white folks never encounter a Black person for more than a few minutes at a time, and definitely don’t live with them (or even near them.)
(In case it is not clear, neither affordable housing/subsidized housing nor welfare have anything to do with "doing something" for Black people or furthering some "Black agenda." She could have told her father that, too – but she may not have known it herself since she willingly engaged in a dialogue about those two ideas within the context of "Black people", perhaps not realizing at a conscious level how racist it is to even do so.)
The diarist, meaning well, could have "gently" educated her father about the truth "sort of like Nixon going to China" (to paraphrase her words). But she didn't. Folks should ask why - and not run from the answer, if it comes to you. Instead of doing the obvious, she instead encouraged her father to continue to believe myths about "Black people," (as if there is any one cohesive fact that unites any of us except for having to deal with the effects of unconscious and conscious racism far too often) and in the existence of a mythical "Black agenda" (Important Safety Tip: there ain't one, or a lot of things not-so-good about being Black in America would have been fixed about 40 years ago; the closest thing we have today to any "Black Agenda" is Tavis Smiley's The Covenant.) So long as he voted for Barack Obama, since he "would be totally against" "those kind of people."
The diarist then compounded her failure to correct the facts by using those same incorrect facts in which her father believes to her political advantage, reinforcing for him that he should vote for a Black man, Barack Obama, because this Black man and his wife, amongst other things, had "advanced degrees and are big time overachievers", thus allegedly making it unlikely that he might feel solidarity with those (few) poor Black people -- like those (few) poor white people -- who do things like fail to maintain the slum housing in which they are warehoused like cattle (the same behavior engaged in by their landlords, many of whom are public housing authorities) instead of being permitted to live in dignity in decent, safe, sanitary and – yes, affordable -- housing. And unlikely that Barack Obama and his wife would subscribe to the afeared "Black agenda". The diarist even went so far as to hint that Barack Obama was likely to oppose such folks, if push came to shove and his approaching things "like Nixon" going "to China" (i.e. a diplomat going into the "inscrutible" --to call out the anti-Asian stereotype that IMO underlies the Nixon analogy -- foreign and potentially hostile nation) didn't work to.....well, the diarist never actually said what Barack Obama was going to do with "those kind of people" if he went "to China" "like Nixon".
But then it got even worse.
The diarist then jumped completely off the diving board with both feet and raised the spectre of Bill Cosby. That name, as beloved as it has always been to me due to his decades-long fight to secure a decent education for Black children in America despite a racist educational system, is becoming as recognizable to most Black folks as "OJ" at this point. It’s code. Racist code (Lord knows nobody talks about the Cosby Show or Fat Albert or Cosby's decades-long love of, and hands-on approach to, Black people (especially poor Black people) anymore. Cosby only comes up now when folks want to talk about "dysfunctional" Black people.) She did so in what appears to have been an effort to reinforce for her dad that there are "different kinds" of Black people – the Cosby’s and Barack Obamas of the world, and all those others. (I guess I should be grateful that she did not quote some Chris Rock at him while she were at it.) She suggested that Barack Obama would likely be and think "like Cosby" -- which in code means that he would likely subscribe to the racist idea that Black people who are socially dysfunctional (at least, when it comes to treating property well or being on welfare, since that's the examples she used and we all know that nobody ever cites stuff like that as a positive trait) deserve scorn, derision, and pity, rather than reparations, help, and an national apology for having survived despite everything from crack's introduction into the ghetto to fund a right-wing war to the use of prisons to warehouse huge swaths of the population for drug crimes to the systematic expulsion/pushing of children out of school to ongoing racial discrimination in employment in favor of the latest flavor of immigrant for more than 100 years, to ongoing racial discrimination in housing (including in terms of the financial terms available to them to live the American dream). To even just trying to drive down the street without getting pulled over and possibly shot if they so much as look at a cop the wrong way.
The diarist allowed her father to use the name "Bill Cosby" to reinforce a core racist idea in America right now (that idea is increasingly popular as an overtly-stated idea, instead of just the subconsciously-believed idea which has floated around for a couple hundred years): the idea that the self-destructive habits of a decided minority of Black folks (yes, contrary to myth the overwhelming majority of US Black folks are just as law abiding and property/housing loving as the diarist, her dad, and most white folks -- something she also could have mentioned to her father, but didn't. Perhaps she did not know it herself, or maybe just didn't think it was as important as getting her dad not to vote for Huckabee by any means necessary) are those people’s own fault, and have no cause than their own failure of morality/intelligence/hard work and no cure other than the same.
This is an idea that is much beloved by many right-wing Black folks who largely reject the idea of subscribing to a "Black agenda" (a group that I guess the diarist believes are like Barack Obama and Bill Cosby, too, except for the devilish detail that many are also often Republicans.)
This type of thinking is the hallmark of modern white supremacy, a passive-aggressive disease of the unconscious mind that replaced the conscious hatred and aggression of just two generations ago. A disease that knows no racial boundaries – anyone, even Black folks, can suffer from anti-Black racism (and many do.) This disease gladly coopts the legacy and language – but only the feel good part of it, not the hard work and collective sacrifice parts of it on the white side of the equation -- of a living saint, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a superficiality of positive race relations and false equality that Dr. King himself would never have tolerated, if one goes by his own words. The words of a speech you’d think was only 2 minutes long given that it is only the tiniest part of it which America’s majority even talks about today – indeed, trots out regularly like a talisman against evil, celebrating the utopia of colorblindness instead of demanding that America make good on her (still unpaid) bad check to Black folks. A colorblindness that many people have said is reflected in the candidacy of Barack Obama, a Black man who too many feel no shame in calling "half-Black" or "part Black" or "not really Black". Either using those literal words, or – most often – a racist code highlighting what are perceived to be his differences (i.e. his white mother; being "overachiever", being "highly educated", or "articulate") from "Black people." None of it said in conscious malice or , but all done because of deep-seated racist thinking.)
Dr. King would have never tolerated the elevation of the illusion of equality through pretty words and "colorblindness" by electing a Black President over the substance of equality he fought and died for, including dignity and respect for the poor -- and especially the Black urban poor that the diarist's father actively maligns (and she subconsciously maligns too) when you she uses their condition and stereotypes about them as a dangling carrot to get her racist father to do what she wanted - not vote for a Republican.
The story reflects for me, yet again, the harmful and unproductive thinking about race displayed by well-meaning yet totally clueless white liberals who simply refuse to confront that most of them pretty much feel the same way, deep down, about Black people as the more overt racists of the world. Both types judge millions of Black people (a) collectively, with no evidence that more than a tiny minority even possess negative qualities and (b) for those that do, harshly for not successfully becoming "exceptions" (i.e. like Barack Obama -- who of course can't be the victim of racism since he's "highly educated and an overachiever" even if he was just as Black to the Illinois state highway patrol before he ran for president as Eldridge Cleaver once was). Only those who have NO clue what Bill Cosby has actually said and done over his lifetime in defense of the very same poor Black people the diarist suggested that Barack Obama would shun "like Bill Cosby" them would have ever said such a thing. Have any of those reading this ever read any of Bill Cosby's books? Ever heard him speak live? Know anything about what he thinks or fees about a "Black agenda"? The answer for most, and I suspect the diarist as well, is "No" -- except for snippets which have now been seared into the national consciousness that Bill Cosby himself said were taken out of context and being misused by right wing whites (and too often, sadly, well-meaning whites like the diarist, like she did merely by talking to a person SHE called a racist about "Black people" and "Black agendas" while linking them Barack Obama’s name to Bill Cosby and suggesting Sen. Obama’s agreement with what she and her dad thought Bill Cosby felt and said about those Black folks who "tear up" affordable housing or "take advantage of the welfare system" (even though Dr. Cosby has never spoken about either and neither subject has anything to do with the overwhelming majority of Black people.)
I guess all is fair in politics and war. Even if it's wrong.
This anecdote, which I feel the diarist wrote to convey what she felt was "good news", inadvertently reinforced one of the things that leave many Black folks like myself -- who also live the in gut-wrenching hope of possibility about the idea of a Black president in Barack Obama, the same as we did with Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Shirley Chisholm in 1972, even if the actual person is NOT necessarily the Black candidate WE would have chosen because of his political views on many things important to the collective experience of Black people in America to the extent there is one -- hesitant about Barack Obama's candidacy. And troubled by how Barack Obama seems to have chosen to campaign on a message which somehow never manages to highlight the positive things that Black people are and have done over hundreds of years as Black people to make America great, rendering rhetorically all of our collective triumphs not the "Black experience" that they were but some deracialized "American experience" (as I heard him do in Oakland, California) but repeats too often and without qualification racist stereotypes and falsehoods. Including repetition of myths about the dysfunctionality of "Black people" without qualifying that he’s speaking about the overwhelming minority of us and that there is no more correlation between dysfunctionality and our race than there is such a correlation for white people.
I will reiterate that Barack Obama is one of my two choices for president (John Edwards is the other). I also gladly admit that I am possessed with the heart hope that I think every Black person in America has that someone who looks like us will sit in the White House before we die and this country might actually finally do right by Black people (although it is definitely hope, rather than any sentiment I feel based on anything Barack Obama has actually said, since of course that might be a nefarious "Black agenda"). Given this, reading that diary, I was heartbroken. Literally, felt clammy and nauseous. Out of fear. I felt that way because, it seems that the very possibility that gives me hope in an Obama candidacy is one that well-meaning folks like the diarist are insisting to their racist families is no possibility at all. The diarist was making a case for Barack Obama using color-coded arguments about what she believed was Barack and Michelle Obama’s "Black identity" to be (and I guess that of Bill Cosby too, who I guess is now an Honorary not that he would consider that an honor) to counterbalance against the very thing -- Black people’s struggles and needs in America left over as the ongoing legacy of our nation's exploitation of our people finally becoming a meaningful policy priority of our government -- that many Black people hope and pray for every day if there is someday a President Barack Obama and many white people like the diarist's father are terrified of.
I've seen a lot of diaries that are like that. Diaries that express the notion that somehow, a President Barack Obama can't make those "Black agenda" things a priority without losing white votes because then he would be just "the Black president" instead of "a president for everyone".
As if those things are mutually exclusive ideas.
So, that diary left me with a knot in my stomach and lots of reason to be afraid for my people's future. Especially when someone clearly well-meaning like the diarist reassures someone she loves that he need not worry that the Black man campaigning to become the next leader of the free world will make a priority out of helping the dysfunctional downtrodden within some Black communities, because "like Cosby" he as part of trying to convince him to vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama would likely be "totally against" them.
I am terrified because of what I see occurring in all of this, and none of it with any conscious thought (except in the handful of persons that have searched the mirror as Tim Wise begs us all to do, and realize that all is not right in Denmark), as we head towards the 2008 Presidential Election. IMO, any Black person who loves Black people needs to spend some time thinking and challenging ourselves and no longer relying on just our heart-hopes, something that Malcolm X warned us about when it comes to politicians in the Black community. We need to really demand that our brother Barack Obama do better, right now, when it comes to articulating a message about where and how we -- Black folks, of which he considers himself a part -- will benefit from his presidency.
That isn't happening. The heart part of me understands why.
What I see happening instead, as reflected in this diary and many conversations I have observed and read, is white people, left and right wing, subconsciously unifying in an effort to fulfill one of their deepest (yet rarely acknowledged and usually vehemently denied) desires since the 1960's: the desire to once and for all free themselves of any guilt for, and any sense of personal obligation to fix, the damage wrought on African-Americans from hundreds of years of American white supremacy and all its institutionalized racism in the present generation. I note how few people have commented on the fact that if things continue apace, there is a very real possibility that a majority of white voters will for the first time in what will be close to 50 years put a Democratic presidential candidate in office (i.e., he will win regardless of what Black voters decide to do with their votes.) As we all know, there has not been a Democratic Party president that Black folks' votes didn't put into office since Kennedy.
One has to examine what powerful forces have made the difference now that they did not make for the preceding 4.5 decades. Arguably, one could blame it on the sheer fatigue of the Nation with the Bush regime, I guess. Yet that explanation does not explain why there is so much fervor behind Barack Obama's candidacy that is not matched in any other campaign. Moreover, Bush fatigue was patent and overwhelming by 2004, with the resultant huge turnouts, meaning that if Bush fatigue were truly the cause, John Kerry would likely currently be running for his second term of office and most folks would not be supporting Barack Obama instead as a newcomer. Nope, my gut tells me that the motivation to change the course of nearly 50 years of white voting patterns has to be something far more powerful than just regular politics. It is my depressed and sad view, based on what I've heard folks say, including the many well-meaning folks like the diarist, that a unconscious motivation is the possibility of the chance for America to "officially" (by electing a Black president) declare the harm of racism in America "over."
Free at last, free at last....?
Racism is this nation's original sin. So, what better way to make a Declaration of Indepdendence from the responsibility to clean up the mess than by embracing a Black presidential candidate who already excites because he is a rhetorical powerhouse and conveys a real sense of hope, yet notably has very little to say publicly about Blacks that is positive and certainly has said nothing other than stereotypical things (i.e. "Black children will see they can succeed" -- as if the majority of Black children haven't been seeing that all along, somehow, in all the other Black folks who have succeeded before Barack Obama) to the point that folks like the diarist are actually speaking about him as a contrast to millions of nameless and faceless "Black people" who "tear up" "affordable housing" and "take advantage" of "welfare." (At least, since he started running for President, anyhow.)
That, to me as a proud Black person who has fought all her life for Black people (and a whole lot of others, proving that one can have "a Black agenda" and actually do white folks a lot of good too!), is some scary shit.
Because the work not only is not done, it was never done and things for the collective are getting horribly, permanently, WORSE.
My true hope is that one day Barack Obama will actually talk about how he will make it better - using the actual words "Black people" in more than a way that just heaps on more criticism.
I genuinely believe that none of what I have written is the result of conscious though – despite its transparency – and that’s the most frightening thing of all to me: the fervor with which so many keep repeating, despite all rational evidence that whites electing Barack Obama will mean or even suggest that "racism is over", "racism will be in the past" or "progress is being made" (pick your own variety of this claim, which I have seen repeated hundreds of times both here on a so-called progressive blog and in the right-wing), when nothing is actually being done or said either them or by the very candidate who they adore about how precisely HOW and WHEN his Presidency is going to cure a nearly 500-year old chronic mental disorder – American white supremacy and its destructive impact on the psyches of everyone of every hue – in an instant and in a way that white candidates who actually espouse policies that might actually make a difference would not.
What happens to the collective condition of Black people -- who already becoming a depressing irrelevancy in the country our slave labor largely built -- when folks are more worried about folks "tearing up" housing than the fact that if folks gave them access to a decent education and didn't pass them over all the time for jobs on the grounds that someone else "works harder" or doesn't "have a bad attitude" they might not be at home bored all day to the point of destructive behavior? Reading that diary, I felt like I knew the answer, especially for that portion of the Black diaspora that is truly downtrodden, the one with all the needs and problems that are tied to and furthered by our country's ongoing legacy of white supremacy leaving them in a hopeless and self-reinforcing cycle? Fuck 'em. They are officially irrelevant.
Because we will have a President who whites believe will approach them "like Nixon" going to "China" rather than as their brother, in Blackness.
I have an idea - try asking a Black man or woman who intends to vote how they would feel about that. Hell, start with Barack Obama himself. Ask him to confirm that he wouldn't be for "a Black agenda". To the diarist's father and everyone else for whom that is a condition of voting for him. Publicly confirm it.
/sigh
We all know this will never happen. It won't happen because folks like the well-meaning diarist and her father will never ask him to do it. Deep down, they and the millions of other whites who are going nuts over Barack Obama to the point where many are promising to cross party lines to vote for him, are terrified of what his answer might actually be. After all, it's not like Barack Obama has actually said anything about this subject. This fact is actually a blessing in one demographic of voters yet a curse in another. Yet the fact that he has said nothing direct did not prevent the diarist from just assuming what he would think and feel about folks that look like him but "aren't really like him", projecting what SHE (not just her father - her language made that clear to me) felt onto him. Projection given a lot of traction, unconsciously, because of the fact that Barack Obama is the son of an immigrant and a white person rather than the descendant of an American slave.
Projection that obviously has value, if that projection (i.e. that he'd be "like Bill Cosby") is effectively used as political fodder to encourage an old-school racist -- whose own daughter called him an anti-Black racist -- to vote for a Black man.
I'm angry and hurt and upset, but I'm also talking straight and honest in this diary (something that many Black people do not do in full measure in this life to white folks because it costs us too much - even the most powerful of us, including Barack Obama and his handlers running his campaign to avoid upsetting whites at any cost). Hopefully people will actually think about what I'm saying rather than get all defensive as is usually the case when the polite veneer of leftist racism is taken on by someone "angry" yet Black, like me.
UPDATE: I feel that I have to clarify something, given the comments. This diary is NOT about whether the diarist should, or should not, have "corrected" her father's racist views. I too have an elderly parent, and I understand completely the idea of "battle fatigue" when it comes to hashing out some things, including political viewpoints. The diary is grounded in the diarist's own reliance on racist code and racist assumptions about Barack Obama to reinforce her father's support of Obama's candidacy (I underlined, in the blockquote, HER words, not his - for precisely that reason). Having said that, I reiterate that I believe it was done totally unconsciously, and is an apt reflection of the relationship between unconscious anti-Black racism and the fervor with which both liberal and conservative whites have embraced Barack Obama. This diary is about how that leaves me feeling and what it might mean for the future of Black America as a collective -- from my perspective as a Black woman (who is very emotionally vested in wanting to see a Black president before I die yet also quite troubled by some of what I see as the unconscious metamessaging of both the campaign and his non-Black supporters.)