Ta-Nehisi Coates

Wright Again

So, I didn't want to immediately comment on Obama's renunciation of his pastor yesterday. In my initial post I expressed shock that folks were so incensed by Rev. Wright. That said, I want to be clear that I thought Wright acted a fool on Monday. There's a lot of chatter out there claiming that Wright was trying to sabotage Obama. I don't buy it. Like I said yesterday, I think Wright just wanted  to say whatever he felt. But he made a few mistakes. Chief among them, as my friend Jelani Cobb has said, was not recognizing the difference between his pulpit and the lion's den. This press lives to expose these sort of performances, and Wright just gave them low-hanging fruit.

Why he would do that, given what he's been through the past few months, just boggles the mind. You can't, on the one hand, attack the press for distorting you, and then go right to the press to communicate who you are to the American people. The saddest part of this to me, is that I don't think Wright understood what was going on. There's a lot of reporting now suggesting that Bill Clinton's biggest problem is that he simply doesn't understand how much media has changed since his White House days. His gaffes are not the product of a decline in skills, as I've written before, but the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what the press has become--a gaggle of cynics who sit around waiting for people say something stupid. Gotcha journalism rules the day. Wright's mistake was much the same--he simply had no understanding of the press.

Frankly, I don't know how Barack Obama goes back to Trinity. The one thing he said that caught me in that press conference was that he goes to church to pray, not to be a distraction. How is that possible now? Any appearance by Obama there would immediately turn the church service into a charade.

One Last Point

No disrespect whatsoever to Brendan Loy, but this is the sort of thing that white people who don't spend much time around black folks say:

This is the promise of the Obama candidacy, encapsulated and made real. Obama is urging blacks to leave behind, once and for all, the politics of conspiratorial victimhood -- the politics of Jeremiah Wright and, although Obama can't afford politically to say so explicitly, of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- and embrace the politics of unity and hope and, ultimately, self-empowerment.

OK, so some black people say that too. But the point I want to make is that to the extent that there are "politics of conspiratorial victimhood" at work in the black community, its because black people have been--and still are--victims of conspiracies. OK, so not much lately, you say? Well we're still suffering from yesterday's BS. Furthermore, forgive us if after centuries of slavery, racial terrorism, police brutality and otherwise wanton discrimination, if we can no longer tell the difference between conspiracy and plain old ineptitude.

Beyond all that, the truth is that the notion that the ideology of victimhood holds some great truck in the black community is consistently overstated by people, who frankly, aren't qualified to speak on this. In fact, as I wrote in my Cosby piece, when black folks were asked to list who they thought had a positive impact on black people, know who finished first and second? Those great paragons of "blaming the white man" Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby.

We don't need Barack Obama to lead us out of victimhood. What we need is white people to stop listening to a few Al Sharpton speeches and concluding that they've peered into the heart of black America. For right and wrong, African-Americans are the original Americans, the only true natives of this country, the only people whose history truly begins here. We have fought and died in every major war this country has fought. If we're guilty of anything it's too much optimism, it's too much belief in American exceptionalism. We are the ones who had to get the shit kicked out us in Selma simply to use a water fountain, and we held up the Bible and the Declaration of Independence while doing it. To the extent that Obama is attracting near universal support among black people, it's a reflection that people who thought that we were zombies marching lockstep with Sharpton and Jackson need to check themselves. Our problem was never that that we thought we thought we were victims, it's always been that we thought we were citizens. 

And Now The Rejection And Denuciation

Knew this was coming, no?

Fear Not Folks

Yup, the Wright business had me down. Feeling a little better after this, though...

Wright, Wright, Wright

I'm still confused some by the latest Rev. Wright hoopbla and not completely sure what to make of it. I'm not so much in agreement with the guy as I am blown away by the fury he's provoked. I don't quite get it. Is Wright really anymore outrageous, than say, Michael Moore? Are his claims any worse than people who blame Hurricane Katrina's 1,800 deaths on gays? What is it about Wright which inflames the media so much more than any other blow-hard? I suspect that some of this has to do with the moral double-standard that black folks have always labored under, that it's related to the reason why black parents tell their kids to be "twice as good," that it has something to do with why Barack Obama's only shot at the presidency is to run a near flawless Jackie Robinson campaign.

In other words, the moral problems of black folks (hubris in the case of Wright) are always overblown. There is something in certain sectors of white America that expects all black people, at all times to act like white people did them a favor by bringing them here in chains. Indeed, Martin Luther King's whole approach to defeating segregation rested upon a sort of surrender, a relinquishment of anger at white racism. Of course when King asked the same of white America--a'la Vietnam, poor garbage workers--he was shot. There is a price to pay for setting aside that anger, that side of us which still feels scars of slavery. Forever, you're held to that outrageous standard, and should one of your own flash that old angst, the vultures began to circle.

There is a running meme going among blacks and whites that Wright is now sabotaging Obama's campaign. But what no one is seeing is that the game is rigged. Obama was sabotaged twenty years ago when, instead of going the Tiger Woods route, he dared to explore and drink deep in the beauty/pathology/irony that is black folks. From that point forward, he was marked. Now in his pursuit of arguably the highest office in the world, Obama finds himself dogged by the "nigger rules" which apply to all black trailblazers--no pessimism, no crying, no Farrakhan, and no rage.

More On Rev. Wright

dNa notes that it really doesn't matter what Rev. Wright says, his very appearance is a liability to Obama. I'll have more to say on this later, but I've been thinking about this since I watched Wright on Bill Moyers on Friday. I've always expected a little bit of compromise out of my politicians--but I also like supporting people who know what they would be willing to loose over. If Barack Obama looses because of Jeremiah Wright--something I don't see happening--I will know what sort of country I'm living in. I'm one of those optimistic blacks that generally believes that the "white working class" is routinely caricatured, that race is complicated, and racism even more so. I have great hope for this country, and I believe that every generation has gotten a little better in how it deals with race.

But I watched Wright on Friday, and I can't, for the life of me, figure out why he's allegedly so offensive to white sensibilities. Pastor Hagee is a certified nut and a bigot, no question. But, really, him endorsing John McCain isn't the reason I won't vote for him. Billy Graham was a lying anti-semite, but that didn't keep me from supporting the Clintons. James Baker says "Fuck The Jews" and is still considered a respectable member of the foreign policy establishment. But when a black pastor is taken out of context, suddenly it's Armageddon. If this is the basis by which we elect a president, then we're in more trouble than we can begin to know.

On Sean Bell

I wanted to lay back for a second and just marinate on this verdict before commenting. Like a lot of black New Yorkers, my visceral reaction to these cats getting off was horror. Ask me to pick sides between the cops and a black dude they killed at his bachelor party, you can guess which way I'm going. But then I started thinking.

First, I want to put what I'm saying in context. Dig this piece from the Times today which basically concludes that black New Yorkers don't see this thing through the same lense that they saw Diallo, Louima, Dorismond etc.

In Harlem, Willie Rainey, 60, a Vietnam veteran and retired airport worker, said that he believed the detectives should have been found guilty, but that he saw the case through a prism not of race, but of police conduct. “It’s a lack of police training,” Mr. Rainey said. “It’s not about race when you have black killing black. We overplay the black card as an issue.”

And further down:

But even as some condemned the behavior of the police, other black men and women interviewed praised Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

“He’s got people who are at least willing to communicate with the black community,” said Salaam Ismail, 50, a youth coordinator, standing outside the Harlem headquarters of Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network on Friday. “The mayor has done a lot of pre-emptive strikes with that kind of stuff, meeting with community leaders.”

On Nov. 27, 2006, two days after Mr. Bell was killed, the mayor convened a private meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall. One of those at the meeting was the city’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who a month after the shooting set up a panel to review the rules and tactics of undercover operations in response to the Bell case.

A lot of this summed up how I felt about this case. We tend to lump all instances of cops shooting innocent black folks into the same ball. But I think it's smart to unpack this stuff and examine each case and what it means.

The New Nas Joint Or Why You'll Wish You Were A Nigger Too

As some of you may know, this joint basically sums up my view on the "Nigger Wars" (I really hate the phrase "The N-Word." It's everything language shouldn't be--weak, evasive, passive and vague). Nas also gets to a very interesting aspect of black life--as much problems as we all have regarding race, I wouldn't trade being a Nigger for anything in the world. My old friend Joel Porter (aka DJ Renegade) once put it as follows: "By the time I'm through\You'll wish you were a nigger too."

I always, always believed that. Being black gives you a sort of knowledge, a particular and original view of America that most white people will never have access to. I'm not even talking politically necessarily. I'm talking about the unique feeling that you get around  1 A.M., when your at a great party, the D.J. throws on your song, and though you can't dance a lick, you come to understand that it really doesn't matter, that the real crime is not dancing at all. I'm talking about things that can go unspoken during, say, your tenure at Howard University, the ability to not have to repeatedly explain your every move, to translate your world-view. I'm talking about an intimate understanding of violence, the knowledge that bar-fights aren't actually fun, and when one dude punches another one in the face, there are no sound effects, and entire lives hang in the balance. I'm talking about running through Central Park in the morning and the mandatory nod you exchange with every black person that jogs past.

Though we war against it daily, it must be said--it should always be said--that it is a beautiful, beautiful thing to be here in this way, to be despised in this way, to live on the margins, just outside, to be a citizen of this country, and yet to know it in ways that it can't even know itself, to know it in ways that it simply refuses to know us. But that's white America's loss--not ours. Let us never forget the blessing of being held outdoors. There's a section in Nicholas Lemann's beautifully rendered The Promised Land, where racist whites in order to prove the loose, animal nature of their black sharecroppers claim that blacks routinely tell them,  "Boss if you could be a nigger on Saturday night, you'd never want to be white again." The "Saturday night" reference is meant to play up this idea of blacks as always partying, and never working. But as usual white racists miss the point. We are bigger than Saturday night. We always have been. We always will be.

If We're Going To Start Counting Black People...

Haha, John Stewart skewers the XX State Doesn''t Matter meme.

Res Part II

As many folks have noted, Res's album was produced by Santi White AKA Santogold. Here's her smoking new single, and somewhat less dynamic video. I think I'm a fan.