Ta-Nehisi Coates

I tell you these days, it almost feels cliche to cite the X-Men as an influence. But what can I say? I don't think I'd have much of a memoir, without them. If it's true, it's true. I mentioned in one of my other posts that absence of religion in my house caused me to search for god-like figures in other places. The X-Men seemed cut right out of what you'd expect from Greek mythology, but with a twist--they were like us. I think in some respect all kids feel alienated. I just knew it was my destiny to be living out in Columbia or Randallstown, going to a school where every day I wasn't thinking about how to not catch a bad one. I just knew there'd been some horrible mix-up. And I just knew I was possessed with something that the wider world wasn't recognizing. Later I discovered what that was--a huge ego.But in those days, when I was trapped in a victim narrative, the X-Men were an allegory for my life--or at least how I wished my life was.

Here it was--It's not because of jacked-up fade, my NBA kicks (Next time Buy Adidas), my ashy knees or big lips that I got teased. It's because I can walk through walls, because my bones don't break, and eyes shoot that sort of darts that punch through steel. Later, as I got older, and became conscious, I developed a more mature interpretation and came to see the X-Men, and all mutants, as like a stand-in for West Baltimore, the South Bronx, and North Philly. In other words, the X-Men repped for anyone in the grand scheme who was under pressure.

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Uhm, Ouch...

It's worth checking this out. I gotta say there ain't much I disagree with here. Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan. Yeah, I've come almost full circle...

Very nice piece from my old editor Stephanie Mencimer on the inherent racism of the Second Amendment. What you didn't know? I'm telling you, it poisons everything. The Essence:

Last week at an American Constitution Society briefing on the Heller case, NAACP Legal Defense Fund president John Payton explained the ugly history behind the gun lobby's favorite amendment. "That the Second Amendment was the last bulwark against the tyranny of the federal government is false," he said. Instead, the "well-regulated militias" cited in the Constitution almost certainly referred to state militias that were used to suppress slave insurrections. Payton explained that the founders added the Second Amendment in part to reassure southern states, such as Virginia, that the federal government wouldn’t use its new power to disarm state militias as a backdoor way of abolishing slavery.

This is pretty well-documented history, thanks to the work of Roger Williams School of Law professor Carl T. Bogus. In a 1998 law-review article based on a close analysis of James Madison’s original writings, Bogus explained the South’s obsession with militias during the ratification fights over the Constitution. “The militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population,” Bogus writes. “Anything that might weaken this system presented the gravest of threats.” He goes on to document how anti-Federalists Patrick Henry and George Mason used the fear of slave rebellions as a way of drumming up opposition to the Constitution and how Madison eventually deployed the promise of the Second Amendment to placate Virginians and win their support for ratification.

The more I read about this, the more depressed I become. This is from Andrew. I know I took a pretty hard line on Jeremiah Wright from jump. Increasingly I feel that was presumptious. Maybe I'd watched too much MSNBC? And also, i did disagree with much of what he was saying--I think it's a bad idea to blame AIDS on the government. That said, this is pretty revolutionary:

He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.

I have never really bought the whole "blacks, all things being equal, are more homophobic than whites" argument. But I do buy the whole "blacks on the South Side of Chicago are more hompophobic than whites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan." My point is that this was a pretty brave thing to do, given the enviorenment as compared to other places where it usually happens. The problem of course is that the same people who aren't going to vote for Obama because of his pastor, probably hate gays also. Sad.

I just finished Chris Hayes excellent take on Jeremiah Wright. Amidst many, many good points in the piece, there was one in particular that caught my eye:

And if, of all things, it is his pastor's heated denunciation of American injustice that undoes the candidacy of an African American with a legitimate chance at the White House, any conscientious observer could be forgiven for thinking: God damn America indeed.

Basically. But I don't think people understand what this really means. For years we've watched as black leaders and white liberals have presented the fight against racism as a battle of morals and justice, not as one of self-preservation. What people fail to understand is that the final victims of racism are always white.

Virtually every pundit who's spent the last week commenting on Rev. Wright has taken the position that Wright's views are likely not Barack Obama's. And yet many of them still believe that it is--and evidently should be--a tremendous hurdle for him to the presidency. This, to me, is the equivalent of standing in the middle of the street while a tractor trailer is barreling down on you, and getting pissed because the people telling you to get out the way happen to be yelling.

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So not sure if you guys have heard, but Maxim named Sarah Jessica Parker the "Unsexiest Woman Alive." I don't have a complicated case against this one. It's just another example of how superficially mean magazines are these days. They would counter by saying that their just trying to sell copies--basically the crack-dealer argument. This is the sort of thing that really brings home that whole "sexism is alive and well" thing. Not that I really doubted, but it's so blatantly the sort of thing that no women's magazine would do. I mean even if you don't get down with her like that, do you really have to put the weight of your magazine behind a bashing of this sort?

Man I'd love for some of their editors to have stand up and be judged. Maxim is one of the few "men's magazines" that I ever read and afterward, actually felt my self-esteem seeping out of every orifice. It's product by, for and about pathetic men. But don't just take my word for it.

Nice post over at the Washington Monthly.

There's an interesting debate about Obama's speech going on between Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan over at the Atlantic's site. Sullivan sees the Right's reaction to Obama's speech as tinged with racism, while Douthat thinks that the problem is that the Right is, well, Right. I think Douthat has a point, but with the following line, and Andrew's rebuttal, he really summed up for me why, despite a strong conservative tradition in the black community, there will be never be any black Republican presence in the near future. Here's Douthat on what white conservatives would like to see out of black people:

The conservative idea of a candidate who's "transformational" on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly

Here's Andrew's smart rebuttal:

I admire Connerly and Steele and Rice and even Thomas after a fashion. But they have obviously not brought black America along with them - or much of white America either. And all of them have failed to be elected nationally or even locally.

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One of the things I tried to do with the book was construct a personal mythology, something that pulled together all the elements of my adolescent life and invokes them in such a way as to make them feel real. A lot of the the things you'll see me speak on in these entries may not stand the test of time. But that's not the point. At the time when the memoir takes place, they felt gigantic. Being young in the 80s was a constant assault of ideas and emotions. Obviously that's part of being young. But to be young and black, a that point, only amplified things. Black folks had existed in this tragic way for so long, and now we were shaking ourselves out of our slumber and assuming this new identity.

So speaking of new identities, I present a few scenes from the original Transformers: The Movie. (I know odd segue) Largely regarded as a commercial and critical flop, I thought this flick was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen. I was 12, this was like 86. I was raised agnostic. But there's a biological impulse to theology, you know? And so I constructed my own out of some disparate source material ranging from Malcolm to Jayce and The Wheeled Warriors (we'll get to that eventually). Anyway, when I was 12, the Transformers were like Zeus in my loose cosmology--they ruled.

I loved how they all had different personalities, motivations, and ways of speak. Even though the Autobots were the good guys--Ironhide wasn't Prowl wasn't Beachcomber wasn't Huffer wasn't Brawn. Transformers The Movie took things a step further and did something that no one (save, maybe Robotech) was doing in the 80s--they killed main characters. Let me not be nostalgic--they did it so they could clear out a toyline and make some cash off a new one. But that wasn't how we saw it. To see Ironhide and Prowl and even Prime go down was world-shaking.

I selected a few scenes from the movie which have lived in my head ever since. One of the most impressive to me, was Prime's heroic death-scene ("Megatron must be stopped"). Then too, the transformation of a mortally wounded Megatron to Galvatron and the subsequent murder of Starscream. I'm sure it won't be apparent why this stuff was shocking--these days, the murder of central characters is basically the main way people gin up ratings (as we'll see on Lost this week). But in those days it never happend, much less on a cartoon. Anyway, check it out and enjoy.

Simply Classic:

Those who encountered the black man Tuesday said he engaged in erratic behavior, including pointing at random people in the crowd and desperately saying he needs their help, going up to complete strangers and hugging them, and angrily claiming that he is not looking for just a little bit of change, but rather a great deal of change, and that he wants it "right now."

"I'll be honest, when that black guy said he would 'stop at nothing' to get change, it kind of scared me," local mechanic Phil Nighbert said. "Just leave me alone."

This is the whole interview, but part the way through Huck speaks on Wright. He came off as totally honest. Maybe the discourse is changing. He did call him Louis Wright though...

Doubt I'll see it. Why, in my mind, did I think this part would go to an Asian cat? Oh well...

Nice piece from Hillary-supporter (I believe) Leon Wieseltier on why Obama scares some portion of the Jewish community. I didn't buy it all, but there's some good stuff in there.

Pretty interesting discussion going on over at Feministing. Some folks are arguing that Obama should have tackled gender issues also. That point springs from Wright's argument that Hillary had not been called a nigger. A lot of folks took umbrage with that, because they saw it as another entry in the Oppression Olympics. I can see that. Though to say that someone has never experienced racism, isn't the same as saying sexism doesn't exist.

More to the point, I think it would have been a bad idea for Barack to have included gender in the discussion. The case he was making was complicated enough. Too complicated, according to some folks. I don't subscribe to that school of thought, but I just don't know why you have to tie in gender at this point. If Barack was addressing homophobia, I wouldn't expect him to address Affirmative Action also. Still, it's a good convo. Go over and get some. Knowledge, that is.

Michael Crowley wanted to hear more welfare/crime/affirmative action/black people bashing from Obama:

Instead he argued that "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." This is a complex and nuanced point--one which, taken from the context of Obama's larger assessment of race in America, won't satisfy people horrified by a preacher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. policies. Other headlines are likely to focus on Obama's overall call for racial reconciliation and a more perfect union. Obama said, quite rightly, that the recent flaps over Wright and Geraldine Ferraro "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through--a part of our union that we have yet to perfect." But the question is whether working class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and elsewhere believe, particularly in a stalled economy, that racially perfecting the union really ought to be a central goal of the next president. I would like to believe so. I'm not convinced they do.

This is the same logic which led Clinton, in 2004, to tell Kerry to throw gay people off the bus. Crowley is addressing the political implications here. But from my perspective, we deserve to know how sharp the rest of America really is. Have we gotten past Willie Horton and welfare? We deserve to know that.

There are people who bear the brunt of cynical welfare-bashing and to us, it looks neither smart, nor insightful. In fact, I'd argue that sort of calculating, inauthentic triangulation does absolutely nothing to close the racial chasm. We deserve to know what we are, to have a campaign fought on issues. We deserve politicians who are willing to risk something, not a bunch of sniveling cowards, huddled around a mass of spreadsheets and demographic data. At some point the question becomes, What are you willing to loose for? What is so essential to you that you won't toss it aside? It was beautiful to hear Obama cite the black community AND his white grandmother as two things he would never disown.

Looks like she's doing fine. Glad to see it.

First off, just as fan of debate, I have to say that this cat is the most incredible counter-puncher I've ever seen. Let's review: It was widely believed that the Wright conflict represented a mortal threat to Obama's candidacy. You could turn on Fox or MSNBC any day this week and hear the talking heads and their claims of impending doom. But Obama pulled the rope-a-dope. All campaign his pushed race to the back, and let all of us--people like me--wax on about what this means for black folks. Only when cornered and with nowhere to go, does he come out with combination that stops the doom-sayers cold. It was the "reject and renounce" moment writ large. Obama turns what everyone is sure a gaffe, into a devastating counter-attack. That is a mean bit of jujitsu

I appreciated Obama extending the olive leaf to Geraldine Ferraro, despite my criticisms, I really did. The dude is running for president, it's his job to lead, and back and forth bickering about her comments would be unsightly coming from him (I said coming from him, not me). No one likes to see people whining to the refs. That saidm this is why Geraldine Ferraro is dead wrong. Being black put Obama in this debate--but there is not a candidate in this race, who sharp enough, or intellectually flexible enough to give the speech Obama just gave--on any subject. What's Hillary Clinton's earth-shattering speech on the future of feminism and gender? Where is John McCain's great ideology-bending speech on foreign policy? Obama has been thinking about this stuff all his life, so I guess to some extent he has an advantage. But it takes a supple mind to offer such a textured analysis of where we find ourselves.

I especially appreciate that he didn't taken Mickey Kaus's foolish, cynical and hamfisted advice and throw black folks off the train. It would have done nothing but lost him some black votes, and gained him nothing among whites, who likely would have taken it all as disingenuous. Instead he explained why we feel the way we felt, why we tend to shout, and with that in hand, did the same for ethnic whites. White bloggers, them being, you know white, tend to think that was the most important point in the speech. But we've had black conservatives before who basically sided with ethnic whites. What Obama did was show how all these grievances, while understandable, ultimately miss the point, that both of us are shooting at the wrong enemies. He went right at the jugular of the Reagan coaliton, and did it without fear. Obama articulated old liberal "voting against your interest" argument, without the patina of condescension and insult.

I'll spare you more and just tell you this--Both Charles Murray and Jesse Jackson think this was a great speech on race. When was the last time you saw that?

More on this later. I thought this was pretty damn good. I don't know if it's a winning speech, but if it isn't, it's hard to see any black person winning anytime soon. This was the part that got me:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me.  And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

That just struck me as honest, and honorable.