Interestingly, he has quite the collection of civil rights era memorabilia.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has a dream in the cover of an autographed memoir. Malcolm X defies a detractor in a typed letter from 1963. Rosa Parks sits, Tommie Smith clenches and Thurgood Marshall reasons in framed and signed artifacts that form Foxworth’s growing museum of the civil rights movement.

I’m not sure if I’m more impressed with Foxworth or the fact that the pre-eminent newspaper in the country has covered what is a pretty non-newsy story about a Black pro athlete and in so doing has managed to humanize one of the men it usually doesn’t even think of as human.

Nice.

The best part of the article?

Later, looking at the collection, he said: “Not often, but on occasion I feel guilty. I have all this because I run real fast and I tackle people. I recognize why I’ve been able to do this. It’s not all because of me or my family or my teammates or my coaches. It’s more because of the faces on the walls in my basement.”

Indeed.  I may watch a Ravens game now.

Maybe.

Related posts:

1. Dope Black Maleness – Brendon Ayanbadejo and Murs

Part of it is that life gets in the way and a brotha ain’t always got time to sit down and take stock of everything that is happening.   And part of it is that I’m losing faith that we liberals always taking to the innanets is even effective.

But this was a big week, folks.  Big education speech.  Big health care speech.  White folks still freakin’ out about the fact that the president got some melanin.  And one of the tried and true liberal visionaries lost his job, leaving Obama with pretty much no one on the Left with which to work.

Time to say something.

But what do I say that I haven’t said already?  I wrote a few months ago about my frustration with the Democrats?  But I wanna take it a step further:

I do not believe there is a progressive movement in this country, which is why I think the Democrats are so ineffectual.

To wit:  Brilliant reporting on how the Democrats fucked up health care from jump.

To wit:

I identify completely with Maher’s core message, which is that Obama and the Democrats won the last two elections and that gives them some license to do what they think is right.

Who is standing up for the millions of Americans who do want health care reform?  Who is standing up for the millions of Americans who want to address global warming, mandatory minimum sentencing, our crumbling infrastructure, and the sorry state of our schools?

Or, to put it the other way, who is holding their feet to the fire so that they can do these things?

There are 59 Democrats in the Senate.  There is a solid Democratic majority in the House.  And the President is a Democrat.

President Barack Obama, flanked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. on Capitol Hill in Washington Jan. 5, 2009. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Can we get something done?

You know, I read the liberal and mainstream blogs and there is passion to spare.  I just don’t know why it doesn’t seem to make it to the Halls of Congress.  Maybe Democratic members of Congress really don’t give a shit about their constituents and so our passion falls on deaf ears.  Maybe our passion is misdirected.  We get outraged at the other side’s racism, but when it looks a bit like something we’d do or say ourselves, we are a lot less quiet.

When are we going to take the Republicans as seriously as they take us?

There is a real, palpable fear of the most powerful man in the world being a Black man and it continues to be the driving force behind the Republican party’s MO. What that means in practical terms is hard to describe.  And because it is hard to describe, so many of us think that means it’s probably not a big deal, it’s probably just the (mis)perception of old school black politicians and black nationalists who hate Whitey, and it’ll die out because “the demographic trends are in our favor.”

And while we take the “wait it out” approach, The Second Reconstruction is ending.

We are gutting the Voting Rights Act, ruling that if you have to choose between discriminating against black folks or leveling the playing field for everyone (which, actually means that everyone has about the same chance of getting screwed), eh, go for the discriminating against black folks.

We haven’t given voting rights to D.C. residents, we haven’t passed a bill to keep people in their homes (which, by the by, wouldn’t cost the taxpayer anything), and we are screwing up the health care and energy bills.  Oh – also we have them 59 votes in the Senate, but the Republicans are holding up many of Obama’s executive branch and judicial nominees, like Tom Perez and Dawn Johnsen.

Oh but we do something.  As Bill said, the other side whines and cries or outright lies about something and Democrats capitulate.   Van Jones should not have resigned.  Single payer should never have been off the table.  We should be investigating the extent to which torture was sanctioned and take it all the way to the top.

Why?  Because we have to stand for something.

It’s foolish to think we can hold onto a majority by playing it safe and not getting anything done.  There is a whole lot of room to move between playing it safe and being crazy single-minded drones like Republicans.  No one is saying we should copy their MO, just a little of their conviction.

When we lose seats in 2010, as is highly likely, then we’ll all take to the blogs whining about how the Republicans are ramming stuff down our throats that we don’t like.  What the fuck are we doing now?

Ugh…you know, the truth is that though Democrats are supposed to be the liberal party, the party of opposition, they are not.  They truly are a hodgepodge of people who don’t like the modern Republican Party.  That doesn’t necessarily equal liberal or progressive.

So we have one party and a bunch of people who don’t like that party.  That’s it.

I like diversity as much as the next guy. But it seems to me that every group within the Democratic rank and file likes having different folks around, long as those folks don’t get in the way of what they want.  So teachers’ unions can hold up education reform.  And Blue Dogs can hold up anything that isn’t “fiscally responsible.”

But this is what you get when the only thing your party can agree on is that you don’t like the old White guys across the aisle.

It really is enough to make you want to disengage.  I like to listen to the president speak.  I’m even moved, mostly.  But I really think the time for speeches is over.

I think its time to govern.

Related posts:

1. Money and self-interest: Why the Democrats can’t get anything done
2. Confused by the Health Care Debate?
3. Van Jones Resigns

Two days ago, four colleagues and I were talking about the degree to which race played in the Skip Gates arrest controversy.  I and a fellow Black colleague were pretty confident, given what we know from news reports about how the incident went down, that race played a role.

My other colleagues, you can imagine, were skeptical.  They argued, rightfully, that someone made a call and the cop had an obligation to follow through and secure the home.  They asked “what are the standard procedures” in situations like this?  Also, not surprisingly, they wanted to make it about the cop’s ego, an idea that is picking up traction online, as if it couldn’t then be about race as well.

Later that night, two other Black friends told me similar stories that they had with White colleagues.  Everything they told me was the same as what went down in the conversation I had with my colleagues, almost down to the language.

White folks are quite comfortable with this notion that there is a pattern of racist behavior in America.  They are reluctant, however, to say that any individual instance is about race.  So what happened to Skip Gates wasn’t racist.  Neither was what happened to Shem Walker.  Or Sean Bell.  Or Oscar Grant.  Or Officer Omar Edwards.

Every individual instance must be rationalized, but then at the end of the year when the stats are compiled we rant and rave against a pattern of behavior, against institutional racism.

Institutional racism is nothing more than a pattern of individual behavior that has become institutionalized.  Redlining is just a lot of White folks deciding where non-whites can live.  Poll taxes were nothing but a lot of White folks making it really hard for Black folks to vote.

They say the personal is political.  Well the individual is the collective.

The goal here isn’t to call the cop a “dirty racist” and write him off.  What I said to my colleagues was that acknowledging that what the cop did to Skip Gates was racist, doesn’t make him a bad person.  This isn’t “i hate niggers” racism, but it is still racism.

The goal is to let him (and other non-Black cops) know that this kind of behavior is a problem.  We need to have processes for training police for how to deal with different types of people.  And we need processes to handle situations after they happen.  We simply do not have this anywhere to the degree we should.

Behavior like this can be involuntary; a lot of White folks have tremendous guilt that they lock their car doors when they drive through a “bad neighborhood” and clutch their purses when they find themselves alone in an elevator with a Black man.  But rather than live in the guilt, we gotta acknowledge it and then do something about it.

Until we do, we are going to keep seeing these individual instances and keep being surprised that the year-end statistics haven’t changed.

Related posts:

1. Officer Barrett apologizes while lawyer defends racist e-mail
2. What’s Wrong with Obama’s Speeches on Race
3. Obama’s conclusion on Gates arrest: Can’t we all just have a beer?

Earlier this week, tigger500 wrote a post titled “What’s wrong with Obama’s speeches on race.“  Read it.  And allow me to extend that discussion.

The problem with Obama’s speeches on race is that his job as a politician– more specifically, a politician with tenuous support and job security– necessitates that he makes people feel good.  He needs to make people feel good or else he gets nothing done and he’s not the president.  That position is fundamentally incompatible with having any kind of honest discussion on race, because an honest discussion isn’t going to make anyone feel good.  If you don’t walk away from a serious discussion on race with your head in your hands, something got sugarcoated.

Obama lectures black audiences on personal responsibility despite the fact that he’s smart enough to know that personal responsibility and accountability aren’t even in the top ten problems facing the black community.  He does it because he knows black audiences will feel good about themselves and motivated to do better, and white observers will feel good that someone is finally giving those irresponsible Negroes a good talking to.  Everyone feels good, Obama wins, and black fathers continue to get incarcerated, undereducated, and unemployed at double and triple the rates of white fathers.

He doesn’t lecture white audiences on personal responsibility and accountability, despite knowing that they need the pep talk as much as we do, because the politics of doing that aren’t nearly as good.  Likewise, he lectures black audiences in metropolitan Atlanta on homophobia because he knows they’re 90% behind him regardless, and he knows white folks will feel good that it’s the Negroes’ fault, not theirs.  Lecturing white audiences in Utah or Alabama on the subject would have far greater impact, but again, the politics of doing that suck.

To Obama’s credit though, he’s a brilliant politician, and the game ain’t easy.  Especially for– and you really cannot say this enough– a black man named Barack Hussein Obama.   The line he has walked thus far on race has been flawed, but flawed in the way the Apollo 11 mission was flawed.  Yeah, some things went wrong, but they put a man on the moon.  On the moon, son.

Fact is, the best thing Obama can do regarding race in America is to work towards fixing the institutional inequities.  Black fathers don’t abandon their families because they don’t feel like being dads, they do it because they get thrown in jail more often, lose their jobs more often, and don’t have generations of wealth built up to fall back on as a cushion.  The playing field is badly tilted.  It’s at a 45-degree angle or worse in some cases.  You can lecture the players about working harder to get up that hill, or you can pressure the league to flatten the field.  Both approaches are worthwhile, but which is more likely to turn your squad around?

Related posts:

1. What’s Wrong with Obama’s Speeches on Race
2. Obama’s conclusion on Gates arrest: Can’t we all just have a beer?
3. Don’t inject race and politics into Pittsburgh gym shooting

No, seriously –  let me start by saying that the fact that we have a president who talks about race seriously at all is a huge step in the right direction.

That said, I am frequently distressed by what the president actually says when he does speak about race.  Because I think he is (perhaps unintentionally) intellectually dishonest about how race truly operates, what life is actually like as a Black person, and what it will take to really create equality of opportunity and an equitable division of resources (which are two very different things that require two separate, but specific, approaches).

Unlike most people, I thought the Philadelphia speech was terrible, a historical, and dangerous.  I thought in his attempt to appeal to both White and Black, he made a crucial mistake that many people make when discussing race — equating Black and White feelings about, and experiences with, race symmetrically.  Meaning White people’s resentment at Black progress was the same as Black frustration with being oppressed.

Simply – though both are legitimate, they are not equal.

To suggest, as he did, that they are, I think is dangerous.  I think it contributes to a feeling of fatigue in America.  Fatigue with remedies for past wrongs.  Fatigue with talking about Black people when we can talk about White people.  Fatigue fatigue fatigue.

This is perhaps unavoidable.  He is a politician and there are many more White people than there are Black people.  He must say what will allow him to stay in power and do what he wants to do to help everyone.  I get that.

But because race operates the way it does, what any prominent Black person says carries enormous weight.  In this case, what he’s saying is incredibly detrimental to a concerted, real fight to end racism (it’s great, if you’re goal is bettering race relations…but yea, that’s a different goal).

We’ve got to find language that talks honestly, directly, and passionately to the specific and unique experience of being Black in America without it being assumed that, by doing so, we ignore everyone else. 

I think Obama attempts to find this language in his speech before the NAACP last week:

The first thing we need to do is make real the words of your charter and eradicate prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination among citizens of the United States. I understand there may be a temptation among some to think that discrimination is no longer a problem in 2009. And I believe that overall, there’s probably never been less discrimination in America than there is today.

But make no mistake: the pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion for simply kneeling down to pray. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights.

On the 45th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, discrimination must not stand. Not on account of color or gender; how you worship or who you love. Prejudice has no place in the United States of America.

But we also know that prejudice and discrimination are not even the steepest barriers to opportunity today. The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.

Lovely language, but later in the speech he says something he’s never really said before:

We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes – because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves. (emphasis mine)

This is the part of the speech that has been missing from all his other speeches regarding race.  And boy – it’s beautiful to see.  Even more beautiful to listen to.

See, the problem I’ve always had with Black conservatism, particularly as embodied in Obama, is the silly belief that Black self-reliance is so Herculean that it can fix all problems that Black folks face.    Black conservatives didn’t always pay the proper attention to just how damaged Black folks really are.

Here though, Obama nods at something that few public Black figures speak enough on – the psychic dimension of racism.  He acknowledges that so much of what being Black is is about wrestling with a legacy of racism that manifests in subtle, specific ways all damn day long.  That takes its toll on a person.

The problem then, in this speech, is that he doesn’t expound on this idea more.  He doesn’t talk about the daily bombardment with anti-black images and ideas that black folks have to deal with.  He doesn’t talk about the fact that Black boys do well until about 4th grade and that it could have something to do with the fact that a racist White America is still largely in charge of his education.

But he does immediately follow it up with the usual, “get off your ass and change,” undercutting the weight and importance of his statement about the psychic damage of racism.  So much so, that no one has mentioned it.

Shame.

Were it that easy for us to collectively pick ourselves up, dust off the racism and keep it moving, we’d have done it long ago.

The sad truth is that even if you work really hard and play by the rules all the time, as a Black person, you are still more likely to “fail.”  Even if you “succeed,” you have to be like Obama and pretend that you aren’t the exception that proves the rule that you are.

Either road isn’t good for Black psyches.  Either road perpetuates the dominant narrative that if there is a problem in Black communities, it’s Black folks’ fault.  Either road doesn’t eradicate racism.

Continuing to deny that Black people are profoundly damaged, that life is hard for us no matter how “well” we do, that the end of Jim Crow, slavery and lynching isn’t the same as the end of racism, that the burden for ending racism has as much to do with White folks as Black folks will doom us to repeat the past.

As evidenced by Pat Buchanan’s unrepentant racism, the tea parties, caricatures of the First Family, racism is alive and well.  Resurging, even.

Now might be a good time to start talking about it for real.

Related posts:

1. Why Obama can’t be the national spokesperson on race
2. Collective v. Individual; Where Does Racism Lie
3. Glenn Beck: Obama is a “racist” with “deep-seated hatred” for whites