what ta-nehisi said
This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.
One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]
The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.
On top of Ta-Nehisi's assessment that the op-ed buys into a bullshit definition of blackness, I would add the charge of general sloppiness. Mabry throws Deval Patrick, Cory Booker and DLC tool Harold Ford into the overflowing kitchen sink just because they all went to Ivy League schools. (When Kerry, Bush and Gore went up against each other did anyone write about the "new" definition of white leadership?) He also quotes craven know-nothings like John "Talking Android" McWhorter and perennial NYT op-ed disaster Orlando Patterson, then goes on to give Pat Buchanan pixels and ink, this as if Pat B was a legit observer as opposed to a central crafter of 40+ years of racist Republican electoral strategy. Here is George Packer in the New Yorker rehearsing one of Buchanan's early hits:
Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”[full story]
Like I need to hear what that guy thinks about anything outside of a truh and reconciliation committee hearing.
Hopefully, one of the long-term upshots of the Obama candidacy will be an equalization of race-IQs, not among Americans as a whole, but at least among media professionals. It's too much to ask that major newspapers diversify their newsrooms, but, at the very least, white editors who are assigning these things should be able to sniff a stale angle when they run across one.
[h/t non-blog-having Jerome H for turning me on to Ta-Nehisi's read.]
An update: in a somewhat ironic turn, someone has asked me to write up the sad tale of my VV career (which closed this post previously) for a few paltry dollars, so I've decided to rescind the second half of the post. (The better able to sell it back to you.) Those of you who got a sneak peek, count yourselves lucky, and those of you who JUST CAN'T WAIT can always try the google cache.
Big hug to you
Fascinating stuff. Funny how these experiences seem consistent across professions...
Well said!
However, if Obama chooses Hellary for a running mate I will come out both guns blazing against him! You can't compromise with prue total unadulterated evil!
what ta-nehisi said
I actually didn't have that big a problem with Mabry's piece aside from the institutional framework that he wrote within...and which your reply highlights. I mean, it seems like Ta-Nehisi is confusing critiques here. It's one thing to say "f**k the NYTimes" (duh) and another to lash out at Mabry for printing a piece in a mainstream media outlet. Is he a traitor? It seems like the old, "outing" anxiety, like we should be keeping our business to ourselves.
Look, there is certainly a new political-geography of race at work in the United States and much of it has to do with white perceptions of "blackness" vis-a-vis their own financial, global power interests. We can definitely see the crystalization and maturation of a "new" educated black political power base. Both you (Gary) and I and Obama are a product of this. And we've not only been on the front-lines of integrating America but also acclimating the under 50 y/o generations to our non-threatening presence. We are, more-or-less, the post-Brown versus Board of Education generation. I'm sorry, but we have an understanding of white power-structures that allow us to maneuver and manipulate our ways through "the system" to our benefit. Part of this, most certainly, has to do with how we broker, or sell, or project, our own racial identity so as to strategically trigger and not trigger white fear. Its a form of seduction. I'm sorry, but we wear and play racial identity in a way that our parents and our parents' parents, simply could and did not. Obama is a genius at this. I just read some of James Baldwin's old poetry last night and its overtly racialized tone and content struck me...so much closer to negritude than anything I or you would ever write. The times are changing, rapidly. And we've played a major role in that change. Maybe we should get back to a more "in-your-face", rebel blackness that somehow doesn't play on the hip hop generations stale identity politic affirmations. Perhaps that's a challenge our generation has failed to accept for selfish reasons. But then again, the cost-benefit (president vs. blue collar labor) analysis may not make it worth it. We're under a lot of pressure to conform and stage blackness in certain highly constricted ways.
Anyway, thanks for the piece.
hey dalton
hey dalton!
I don't think Mabry is a traitor, I just fear for his safety! I am a certain kind of old school media nationalist who frets that institutions like the NYT will bleed a black man dry! It seems to me that the best use of an org like the NYT is to come at these issues from the side/back, the way Kelefa Sanneh did before busting out to the New Yorker. Kalefa wrote fairly exclusively about music for years at the Times and then busted out with a politics/culture piece at the New Yorker, which strikes me as a kind of FU/how you like me now.
I would (in a friendly way!) differ on the idea that there is new racial math that our generation is "better" at parsing. As PL Dunbar once put it way back when:
WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
I think middle class black people have always understood (and reaped) the benefit of "de-threatening" themselves vis-a-vis. But if more and more people of our generation are doing that, I'm not sure if its because we're particularly insightful or because there are just record numbers of black middle class folks walking and talking.
cont.
yea, i hear you but lets face it, we, like dunbar, may still be hiding behind a mask...i know i am, shit...but he wasn't about to see no negro win the democratic nomination. back then the democrats were a far more blatantly nazi outfit than they are today. he basically committed suicide because he couldn't publish what he wanted to write. this is a little different than the dillema faced by mabry or kalefa but it does essentially loop back to your essential thesis so there's no real conflict in our pov here. i guess the point is well taken in that i would never be able to be a columnist for the new york times. in fact, i quite explicitly told a friend of mine several years ago that if they ever see my name in that rag it was against my will. f**k em, tru dat. speak truth to power while we can...the opening might not last that long.
peace
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