re: The Great Endarkening, I wrote:

Typical! They put us in charge at the precise moment it all really starts to come unglued.

But, obviously, the other thing is that it's this very "ungluing" that unsticks the door enough for a Presidential first (I would argue black or female) to (maybe) walk through. A strong and prosperous America as we have previously understood those things to mean (strong, prosperous, America) would have neither needed nor allowed now evoked (invoked?) the kind of change a first black or female president represents.

Three distinct things that made an echo recently:

1 - In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050. [full story]

2 - Every asshole in America knows the change is coming:

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. [full asshole, by which I mean, full Mark Penn]

3 - But unless we (by which I mean you and I, dear reader) do something quick, that demographic inheritance check is very likely going to bounce:

Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world. Among the various consequences of this was Russia's reemergence as a new kind of world power -- an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. [...]

We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America. [full Jim Kunstler on the implications of the Georgian conflict] [h/t James Wolcott]

Typical! They put us in charge at the precise moment it all really starts to come unglued. Better get your lead on now, colored folks, while there is still an outside chance of righting the ship. 2050 will be too late, and, moreover, the Mexicans and Central Americans will be blamed for the mess, and, by extension, blacks, gays, cities, evolution and so forth.

"Republicans wear sneakers, too." - Michael Jordan on why he wouldn't endorse Harvey Gantt in Gantt's run for Jesse Helms' senate seat. h/t Christopher Chambers for the reminder.

According to the LAT:

Vice President Dick Cheney
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
Sen. Elizabeth Dole
former Republican presidential candidate Kansas Sen. Bob Dole
GOP Sen. Richard Burr, sat nearby.
Chris Dodd of Connecticut
Joe Biden of Delaware
Gov. Mike Easley
Cindy McCain

I get a lot of mail from Chris Dodd, asking me to call my congressman or send an email, and as such it was sad to see him on the above list. In much the same way that I refuse to EVER use any of Firedoglake's activism tools or to participate in any action sourced from them, I'll be unsubscribing from Dodd's list and action alerts. There are lots of ways for me to reach out to Congress without having to tacitly endorse Dodd by giving him my data or allowing him to bundle me into an aggregate list of people he can claim to have activated or corralled. As far as I'm concerned, unless you are Helms' bastard child, there's no reason for a progressive to be crying in the front row at his funeral. And even then...

But into the Book of Racial Grudges, Dodd! Right next to Hamsher!

Jelani Cobb sends this in:

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly's absurd defense and find "reasonable doubt" despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

We have proudly seen the community take to the streets in defense of Black men who have been the victims of police violence or racist attacks, but that righteous outrage only highlights the silence surrounding this verdict.

We believe that our judgment has been clouded by celebrity-worship; we believe that we are a community in crisis and that our addiction to sexism has reached such an extreme that many of us cannot even recognize child molestation when we see it.
We recognize the absolute necessity for Black men to speak in a single, unified voice and state something that should be absolutely obvious: that the women of our community are full human beings, that we cannot and will not tolerate the poisonous hatred of women that has already damaged our families, relationships and culture.

We believe that our daughters are precious and they deserve our protection. We believe that Black men must take responsibility for our contributions to this terrible state of affairs and make an effort to change our lives and our communities.

This is about more than R. Kelly's claims to innocence. It is about our survival as a community. Until we believe that our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives and friends are worthy of justice, until we believe that rape, domestic violence and the casual sexism that permeates our culture are absolutely unacceptable, until we recognize that the first priority of any community is the protection of its young, we will remain in this tragic dead-end.

We ask that you:

• Sign your name if you are a Black male who supports this statement: http://www.petitiononline.com/rkelly/petition.html
• Forward this statement to your entire network and ask other Black males to sign as well
• Make a personal pledge to never support R. Kelly again in any form or fashion, unless he publicly apologizes for his behavior and gets help for his long-standing sexual conduct, in his private life and in his music
• Make a commitment in your own life to never to hit, beat, molest, rape, or exploit Black females in any way and, if you have, to take ownership for your behavior, seek emotional and spiritual help, and, over time, become a voice against all forms of Black female exploitation
• Challenge other Black males, no matter their age, class or educational background, or status in life, if they engage in behavior and language that is exploitative and or disrespectful to Black females in any way. If you say nothing, you become just as guilty.
• Learn to listen to the voices, concerns, needs, criticisms, and challenges of Black females, because they are our equals, and because in listening we will learn a new and different kind of Black manhood

That works for me.

I guess there's no chance cut-and-run McCain helped inspire Osama?

In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, howev er, was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were "paper ti gers" who "after a few blows ran in defeat."[from Time]

Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing the invasions of Somalia and Haiti, just pointing out that Republican rhetoric about invasion, withdrawal and the rightness of those courses of action is bullshit.

h/t Wayne for forwarding.

[El Pais cover h/t gawker]

My man Siddhartha, like many people, refers to Obama as "The Hope" but every now and then a wire gets crossed and he calls him (or maybe I just hear?) "The Truth."

How to be useful?

That's the thing I've been wondering since last night. How can I, ebog, myself, personally do my part to help insure Obama becomes the next president of the United States? Hillary Clinton and her dead-enders don't think Obama has a chance in hell of becoming POTUS, so they're not just going be useless moving forward but flat out detrimental. I think these people could actually see him becoming the Democratic nominee - TO THEIR INCREDULITY AND CHAGRIN - this because they're the kind of self-hating "liberals" who believe their party is self-destructive, weak-willed and uniquely susceptible to racial bullying. These kind of White Resentment Democrats completely agree with Rush Limbaugh that black people get things handed to them on silver platters, and up until last night they imagined a future for the party where the mark of its strength would be its ability to resist being "mau-maued". The dream of such a Democratic party probably ended last night - provided of course, Obama wins.

So: how to be useful? Blog? Volunteer? Phone bank? Donate? What are you planning to do?

Make no mistake. The Clinton surrogates (not to mention the Clintons themselves) who will be campaigning for Obama over the next few months will do so half-hearted and with the fingers crossed. They just don't believe a black man can ever become POTUS. That's not saying they think it would be a bad or anything were such an event to occur (some of my best friends, and all), it's just that they don't think it will happen given what they think they know about America. That's why Hillary Clinton was willing to praise McCain and attack Obama in the same breath:

[h/t Ta-Nehisi]

That, or they're just terrified that politics, like popular music or big league sports, will be transformed by the rise of Obama in ways that will make it difficult for the average white politician to effectively compete. I have had my issues with The Hope, in that there are aspects of it that strike me as the political analogue of the Oprah-approved Secret, but I have never bought into the idea that Obama supporters are "cultish." Some people connect with Obama so deeply not because they're pre-disposed to be mindless followers, but because this particular candidate offers those who are properly configured unique and novel ways to connect. Obama's race, his youth, his demeanor, his facility with popular culture, his message, his looks, his interactions with his wife, his embrace of the internet, his calm, all of it - as the total candidate package Barack Obama just offers more facets, channels, textures and hooks for people relate to and latch onto. The difference between him and Hillary just at the level of candidate craft was often like comparing an analog broadcast tv with a digital HD in surround with TIVO. If you'd never experienced the new and better version of the tube, people who spend a lot of time fiddling with it and all those features might seem cultish to you as well.

Every black "first" changes the game they enter irrevocably, for the simple reason that overcoming the structural obstacles between them and the playing field often calls upon them to be "better" in some aspects than most of their white teammates, sometimes heroically so. The irony here, of course, is that Hillary Clinton had a chance to be a first too, but she squandered it by clinging to the most regressive elements of her party and the most shameful riffs in American political rhetoric. Nobody jumps from a minor, chitlin, girls or other marginal league to national "majors" that they were previousl excluded from by offering solid familiar fundamentals. They do it by offering something so unusual that it makes up for them being negroes, minor, chitlin, girls or marginal. They do it by being useful.

There's a risk of exceptionalism and essentialism in the idea that black participants by definition bring new qualities to any field of endeavor that they've been previously excluded/absent from (whatever the reason). But the one thing you can safely say they bring is the experience of being excluded from the job on the basis of race. I imagine that there are gigs where that specific background and experience adds little to a person's conduct of their job, this even as the reduction of an inequality increases the general amount of good and justice in the world. But I don't think the presidency is one of those jobs. I think a black president is by definition a better president because of the unique understandings, rhetoric, ways of connecting to country, types of moral suasion, demons and, yes, pressures they will be under. There are things that a white Democratic president might do that would be simply impossible for a black Democrat to do. Oppose reductions in mandatory drug minimums, for example.

But since so much about racial psychology is contradictory, hand and hand with the fear that Obama can't win is the equally racist fear that he can't lose. This fear about Obama isn't that he'll be, as Pandagon's Jesse Taylor put it, "Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963," but that he'll be Oprah, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. This fear worries that no "regular" white person will ever win again once Obama has changed the game, especially not in a nation where millions and millions of potential voters recognize a Hova reference when they see one. And yes, I know there are lots of white stars in the NBA. White folks know them too, and know that they're Croatians and Canadians and Spaniards and so on.

The beauty of this terror is that it encompasses not just the black body that inspires it but all those bodies - black and otherwise - that are sympatico with that originating black body. White Resentment Democrats don't just resent black people, they have issues with the young and the cool and the internet and youtube and loud music and the agile - everything really that leaves them feeling out of touch and falling farther behind day by day. They disdained Kerry for being a "snob" and they would have resented John Edwards for being too good looking. Hillary doesn't represent these people, she roused them from a stupor in hopes of using them against Obama, and now she's about to slink off and leave the mess for him to fix.

But it's amazing, isn't it? A black nominee for the president of the United States! And not some Colin Powell ex-soldier bullshit aimed at the lizard brain, his blackness painted over in a protective layer of medals. Who woulda thunk it?

I guess every era is convinced they live in the best/worst of times, but when I read stories like this one in the LA Times (h/t Digby) I feel that our claim on America's nadir is more than narcissism:

In May 2007, Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old transgender immigrant from Mexico, was sent to a detention center in San Pedro after being arrested on a traffic charge.

Arellano, who was born a male and had come to the United States illegally as a child, had AIDS at the time of her arrest but exhibited no symptoms of the disease because of the medication she took daily. But once detained, her health began to deteriorate.She lost weight and became sick. She repeatedly pleaded with staff members at the detention center to see a doctor to get the antibiotics she needed to stay alive, according to immigrant detainees with whom Arellano shared a dormitory-style cell. But her requests were routinely ignored.

Apologies for the Hamsherite sourcing on that clip, but it was too good not to share.

Asked why she's staying in the race, Hillary Clinton today evoked, of all things, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Talking Points Memo has video of the offending comment and of the non-apology.

I had to go over to the otherwise odious FOX News to learn that Clinton made much the same point on May 7th, but the story didn't catch on until she repeated it today and the reference was picked up by the Drudge Report. Clinton's subsequent non-apology (no reference to Obama or even why the comment might be offensive) and the Drudge sourcing indicates to me that her camp has processed this issue Jane Hamsher-style, meaning they view it as nothing more than "ginned up controversy" (to use Hamsher's words after the Blackface Joe incident) created by manifold enemies in order to "further distract from the issues important to the voters"Clintons. In this view of events, instead of legitimate concern over Clinton's word-choice, we have black folks, with our dumbness and our annoying hypersensitivity and tendency to keep losing leaders to gunfire, being played for cynical, strategic advantage.

As November draws near, expect the number of times someone - be they GOP and Democratic partisan - refers to, references or depicts people pointing guns at Obama, or lynching, or sexually torturing Michelle Obama to only go up. Exponentially.

When the right wing does it, it will be a media outrage, and when someone on the left does it, it will be just an "ooopsie!" that the right is trying to exploit, so shut your black mouth if you know what's good for you. That each of these episodes will feature white folks fantasizing about the physical mortification of the Obamas, and that racism is the one thing that often unites white folks across the political spectrum, will not be discussed.

dave mckenzie's while supplies last

Me writing about the Dave McKenzie show now up at LA's REDCAT gallery.

May 23, 2008--In Brooklyn-based artist Dave McKenzie's tantalizing first solo show "Screen Doors on Submarines," our conversation about race spins and spins like a broken record, our thinking trapped in cycles and rituals like a buggy program stuck in a loop. The work on display at downtown Los Angeles' REDCAT gallery through June 15 doesn't necessarily show us a way out of those loops, but McKenzie is young man (31), and his show is a strong solo debut that marks him as an artist to watch. With time his work might just give us some clues as how to get unstuck – provided, of course he doesn't fall into one of those pesky grooves he so effectively depicts.

Like Kehinde Wiley, McKenzie works with popular culture as a raw material. But unlike Wiley, with his wry, courtly depictions of black men heroically embodying a kind of imperial hip-hop ideal, McKenzie turns his back on luxe, collectible surfaces in order to brood a bit on the contradictions inherent to media, entertainment and our own folk mythology. In McKenzie's current show, things don't so much fall apart as they spin off on their own stubborn trajectories. [full me]

The show is on view at REDCAT until June 15th, so if you're in LalaLand, pay a visit.

A piece on viral video, Mumbo Jumbo and Barack Obama in TheRoot.com:

Whether it's the Vote Different ad that kicked off the primary season's viral warfare, or a completely loopy set of videos called Barack in 74 that imagine our next president as a resolutely nerdy stoner at Occidental College, this has been the best campaign ever for ads and videos. It's also been a completely one-sided campaign. Whoever first said "there is joy in the struggle" likely wasn't thinking of viral video, but if the muses of humor, visual intelligence and mashed-up insight could vote, they would clearly be voting Obama. (A tip of the hat to Media Assassin Harry Allen for bringing "Barack in 74" to my attention.) [full story]

The Root doesn't embed video, so here are some of the clips I mention: