Weren't you the guy arguing that the tennis player Blake wasn't really black because he probably jumped in leaf piles in Greenwich, Connecticut rather than having a hard-knock life in da 'hood?
No, it was because all his friends were so, so white.
It is astounding how far we have come as a country. I mean, that we can be having this discussion -- this basically pretty silly discussion -- on any level is great. It's fantastic.
I hope that wherever they are, Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm are chortling over the fact that this is the caliber of stuff people can find to attack him on. That's IT? He's not black ENOUGH?
(yes, yes, links at Apo's notwithstanding)
Black tennis players can establish street cred like Serena did. By dedicating your victory to a sister shot by Crips.
Maybe Obama dress a bit more urban or something.
I think I was the one arguing for the "piles of leaves" test, though I believe there was a sweater requirement as well. I stand by it.
I think Dickerson comes out looking pretty good, really, and when she says, "What this is is a critique of white self-congratulation," my second reaction (after a momentary flinch at "what this is is"--so inarticulate!) is that she's right. All she's saying is that comments like Biden's are exactly the point: Obama's "clean" because he's not a nigger.
"after a momentary flinch at "what this is is"--so inarticulate!"
Jokes aside, is that incorrect language?
*that's* why you're up so late.
I work a grave shift.
Graveyard shift. Maybe you should graduate to speed.
"What this is is X" is grammatical enough. ("What this is" is a noun, the subject of the sentence, which is asserted to be X.) It's a little redundant, though, since "What this is" can usually be shortened to just "this". I think it's mainly used for rhetorical emphasis, or as a way to buy time when extemporizing. No great sins, those.
Graveyard shift. Maybe you should graduate to speed.
On graves we have our own lingo you daytime working honky.
And the Right just sits there smiling whilst the punditti spend time blathering on whether Obama is "black black", "black enough". How about Halle Berry? Kobe? Beyoncé? Sarah Culberson? Billy Dee Williams? [who says he isn't black, by the way; he's "West Indian"] Does every person of colour now have to trace his or her ancestors back to slaves in order to have street cred? Does that mean that the descendants of the free people of colour of New Orleans are not "African American" ? [After all, they frequently owned slaves, as well.]
And whilst all of this is being argued, the seeds are being sown upon the fertile mudbrain of the average Joe Whitebread, who is now going to fret that a president who is not lily-white is not going to have *his* welfare at heart - after all, those dark folk seem to think that priorities = skin colour...
And all that fretting and fuming and punditting will drown out the sound of Obama's platform and ideas.
And somewhere Karl Rove is smiling, smiling.
On a drive across the country after picking it up a couple of years ago I established to my satisfaction that I am 35 years younger than the next youngest owner of this car. I get a stipend from General Motors every month just for this.
It has two stickers on the back. One is an Anarchy symbol, and the other says "My Other Car is an Oldsmobile."
Now you need an "I'd rather be playing pinochle."
13: It's grammatical, but it's lazy and annoying. And yeah, I do it too. I think it usually happens because people are consciously responding to a question, real or implied: "what's that?" And they start with the subject, because it (the subject) is what they're trying to define. Same reason a lot of freshman comp papers consistently use vague pronouns ("this," "that," etc.)--precision can be difficult if you're feeling your way towards what it is you're trying to say.
I don't know, Dickerson comes of well in that she's on to Colbert from the start, and doesn't get angry--and her point at the beginning, about white triumphalism, is basically valid (though it would be equally valid if Obama's father weren't from Kenya)--but on the whole, doesn't Colbert make the whole debate look pretty silly?
comes off well. I've been taking stupid pills, is my problem.
26: He does, but that's his job. And in some ways, it is--but Dickerson has valid points to make, and I think she does make them. Plus I just really liked how at the end, she just gives up and says "ok, you've got me there."
Yeah, I thought that was sort of charming. And that is Colbert's job, but he's not always this good.
Andy Griffith began his career in the 1950s with a comedy monologue called "What it Was, Was Football". So it was once considered to be hillbilly dialect. (Also, in the 1950s, football was this exotic thing that a country boy wouldn't know about.)
I was with Colbert until he "suggested" having Obama be temporarily enslaved; how don't care ironic your "right-wing pundit" character is, saying that to an actual black person sounded a very wrong note to me.
DonBoy: Under many circumstances I would agree with you, but in my judgment Colbert gauged correctly the mood of Dickerson and his audience, and so got away with it. Had she been even a little less atuned to what he was doing, it could have been truly awful. But that's part of what comics do - take risks, and hope to hell they get it right.
Prediction: Saturday Night Live will do a skit in which Obama "acts black" to boost his support from the "black community".
It is sad that in 2007 anyone is judging political candidates by what "stock" they descended from.
Does every person of colour now have to trace his or her ancestors back to slaves in order to have street cred?
Definitive test If my racist grandmother-in-law gets scared when you walk behind her on the street, you're black.
Uh oh, Cornel West sure seems like he's saying Obama's black. Oh, snap!
33: Is that necessary and sufficient, or just necessary?
Poking around on the internets, I see that the Senator is distantly related to Dick Cheney.
now see, I didn't actually have the impression that dickerson dug Colbert's routine. My thought on watching this was, "why the fuck do people go on this show without looking into what the Colbert gimmick is?" Which is still my question.
People's inflated selfimage means they either think its so important to get their view out, or they can take on professionals.
or they can take on professionals.
People make that mistake with guys like Stewart and Colbert all the time. Go in thinking that he's *just* a comedian, and find out the hard way that these guys can run verbal circles around them.
Definitive test If my racist grandmother-in-law gets scared when you walk behind her on the street, you're black.
That reminds me of my rejoinder to Jewier-than-thou Jews who tell me I'm not really Jewish because I eat non-kosher food, etc: "If the Nazis would have sent you to Auschwitz, you're Jewish."
When I lived in NYC, I got approached at least every week or two by Hasidic dudes, usually in pairs, asking me if I was Jewish. I'm pretty sure that makes me Jewish.
I always answered truthfully, whereupon they politely bid me good day and moved on, but I always wondered what the next step would have been if I had answered, "what, do I look like a goy?".
in the 14th century, my ancestors mixed with Moors that conquered Sicilia. Does that make me a North-African-Italian-American? does that also make me 1/64th islamofascist?
all this hyphenating and parsing out of our heritage does nothing for any of us. and i'm surprised at a Black women seeking to dilute the solidarity of the Black culture by a process of exclusion. is that what we've always fought against?
40: Yeah. One's self-definition should be that of your most dangerous enemy. As for "He's not black enough" or "White people mean X when they say Y", fuck it all, it's intellectually indefensible.
43: From what she says, though, that's not what she's doing. She's reminding white America that they shouldn't pat themselves on the back so much for being colorblind, or for the triumph of social mobility, because Obama's story isn't like the typical story of a black American in the 60s.
I'm in sympathy with the sentiment, though, because there's something very distasteful about parsing someone's authenticity based on their ancestral heritage, especially a parsing that seems to veer dangerously close to arguing that Obama isn't black because he went to Harvard and Columbia. Which seems to be a good reason for not framing it in terms of black/anti-black.
She's reminding white America that they shouldn't pat themselves on the back so much for being colorblind, or for the triumph of social mobility, because Obama's story isn't like the typical story of a black American in the 60s.
If that's what she's doing, she's taking away one incentive for people to vote for Obama, and I'm now hostile towards her.
She's reminding white America that they shouldn't pat themselves on the back so much for being colorblind, or for the triumph of social mobility, because Obama's story isn't like the typical story of a black American in the 60s.
The underlying assumption seems to be that we do and have in the past cared a lot about being colorblind or the triumph of social mobility. That strikes me as almost willfully naive. We did in the past and do now want the problem to go away; Obama's a possible step toward that end.
No, I think the underlying assumption is that if Obama wins the nomination, many people will see it as reason to believe that the race problem is solved: if Obama did it, why can't everyone else? (Do we really need affirmative action? &c, &c.)
Her argument seems to be pointing out that Obama's background just wasn't the same experience, so don't confuse willingness to accept one with willingness to accept another. It seems her mistake is not recognizing exactly how big a step forward it would be, because it's pretty damn huge.
America will be a racist country until it elects 50 Cent president.
I dunno, I could have just been filling in, but it sounded to me like she was arguing more that since Obama wasn't raised in contact with American black culture, that he wasn't "black", as in "someone who is culturally black". Really, if it's *only* the color of his skin, then he's only black in a very restricted sense. He might as well be a white guy who dyed his skin and curled his hair.
But, 49.
Hehe. Sinfest has an Obama reference.
He might as well be a white guy who dyed his skin and curled his hair.
That seems to be a stretch.
49: But that argument has precious little to do with where Obama's dad came from and more to do with how much money his parents had growing up. Any politician, slave descendant or not, who stands a shot at the presidency is going to have to be rich, and most people who are rich came from parents with a decent amount of money. Dickerson's critique of white self-congratulation has nothing to do with her blacker-than-thou argument.
51. We should at least give him a chance in the debates.
Any politician, slave descendant or not, who stands a shot at the presidency is going to have to be rich, and most people who are rich came from parents with a decent amount of money.
like Clinton.
56. i don't think so. Dickerson admited he faces more challenge than a white in the public arena.
Next thing you know, someone's going to be on tv claiming Obama is not really the antichrist.
49 gets it, I think. It's the same thing as we were talking about on the 'articulate' thread -- there's some racism focused on literal physical characteristics, but there's plenty attached to cultural signifiers of being African American. If Obama gets elected, that demonstrates that people have gotten over the literal physical racism, but not that they've gotten over being racist about cultural signifiers of being African American, because Obama isn't culturally African American.
It kills me that people insist on seeing the chance to vote for Obama as a chance to demonstrate their moral decency. It's insane, and insofar as Dickerson's treating that as a reason worthy of discussion, she's helping the insanity along. Moreover, I don't see that justification for voting for Obama translating into many votes; it's easier to vote as you would otherwise want and just claim to have voted for Obama.
It's not so much a motivation, as a diagnostic, if you see what I mean -- a country where an African American can get elected President is somewhat less fucked up about race than we appear to be.
But I think that there's a very common attacking the straw man thing going on here. A country in which a weathly, non-slave descended African American could get elected president is indeed somewhat less fucked up about race than we appear to be. Just because it's still somewhat fucked up doesn't make that statement untrue.
I can think of many ways a similar line of attack could be opened up against Hillary Clinton for not being representative of American women, but I'd rather not explicitly lay them out, because I think that they're invalid and offensive.
I for one welcome our new anti-Christ.
Also: dude, ogged, are you too cool for YouTube?
This potpourri of video formats is not working out for my agèd, buggy computer.
/whine, whine, masturbate, whine
I looked for the clip on YouTube, but didn't find it. Though the answer to your question is "yes."
/whine, whine, masturbate, whine
Hott.
At least you didn't call me "slice."
No one is too cool for YouTube. Besides, the video doesn't work in Safari (or at least my Safari).
But if it's a Comedy Central clip, Viacom has been on a DMCA takedown rampage, so it makes sense that it'd be harder to find. So if someone were to upload it, they should describe it as "debra dickerson on some comedy show" and then we could all find it.
You can find it on Colbert's page, if you scroll down the recent videos.
It's not so much a motivation, as a diagnostic, if you see what I mean -- a country where an African American can get elected President is somewhat less fucked up about race than we appear to be.
Maybe (maybe) that's the intent, but that's not the effect. We've had a spate of stories about HRC's present dominance among African-Americans, stories about questions surrounding Obama's "blackness" (including a few citing to Dickerson, as well as Crouch), and stories connecting the two. If Dickerson's really talking about what it will mean and what it should mean if Obama wins the nomination or wins the Presidency, she's well early and doing the Devil's (here, HRC) work, however unintentionally.
55: I don't think it's quite that. It's the fact that a) his blackness is derived from an African immigrant, not an African-American descendant-of-slaves and b) he was not raised by anybody black at all.
So basically racial identity has multiple sourcing components--a) your genes, b) the history of your genes, c) how you were raised, d) what you look like, and e) what people think of you and treat you as. He's got a, d, and e but not b & c. To me the important thing is self-identification as long as self-identification isn't totally crazy. I.e. Colbert is not black. But Obama has 3/5 reasons to feel bllack, (1/5 is good enough for me), so whatever he says is whatever I say.
That's just the way I do it. Of course, I wish everyone would do it the way I do, like most things.
73: Actually, I think Viacom--specifically in the form of Comedy Central--is the only media company that is treating this intelligently. It doesn't make sense to go on a DCMA rampage unless you host your own videos and make players available and sell stuff on iTunes. They do that. But people like me don't watch TV and don't watch commercials b/c I can watch these videos on the internet, and they have to recoup that money somewhere. And by explicitly yanking the videos after a certain amount of time, they make sure people try to watch them quickly, and thereby probably have some of the most solid CPM data in the industry. There's no law that they have to produce this stuff, after all.
Colbert is not black.
Interestingly, he's not French either.
For an alternative take on the subject (and an example of why Comedy Central is funnier than SNL, sadly), you can watch this.
But Obama has 3/5 reasons to feel black
There's a joke to be made here about the pre-13th-and-14th-amendment constitution, but I can't quite find the funny.
It's not so much a motivation, as a diagnostic, if you see what I mean -- a country where an African American can get elected President is somewhat less fucked up about race than we appear to be.
But then there's the effect we mentioned before, well stated in that 1995 Malcolm Gladwell piece. Gladwell claimed the state of affairs where many small business owners were happy to hire blacks who are African or West Indian immigrants, but not African-Americans, so that there were examples of A-A's pretending to be immigrants to get jobs in their own neighborhoods, was in some ways worse than racism simple. He put it something like "the one was merely hating for the color of your skin, the other was worse because it hated you for who you are." Although a light-skinned Canadian of partial West Indian background, Gladwell articulated this divide and its resentments better than I've ever seen elsewhere.
Should be easy to find at his web page.
51: We've already got a two-bit President, so we're halfway there.
81: That was sort of what I was trying to get at.
In the late '60s black power organizations emphasized global solidarity with people of color and considered the black experience in America to be analogous to the colonial experiences in the third world. Debra Dickerson apparently missed this phase of black cultural thought.
Looking at the CharleyCarp genealogy I see both Obama's parents died in their 50s. Was either death an accident? He's 46 now? Possibly not a two-termer?
Oh and M\tch M
"When I lived in NYC, I got approached at least every week or two by Hasidic dudes, usually in pairs, asking me if I was Jewish."
Were they Jews for Jesus looking for converts? They tried it on me..once.
78: Funny concept, but worst Jesse Jackson impersonation ever.
I've been approached too, in Portland OR. They were real Hasids looking for Hasid-curious secular Jews. A Jewish friend of mine did start going to their gatherings, but he relapsed to Woody Allen after awhile. He's now in Israel, though, as a secular Jew, and loving it.
One thing he found out was that nice Hasidic girls can't even shake hands with guys, but they can flirt and talk dirty like crazy. It's all there in Rabbi Ben Ezra, I guess. There seemed to be a Mormonesque tease at work.
