Brown Man Thinking Hard

I joined a panel yesterday on "World Have Your Say", a BBC Radio show that focuses on hot topics from around the world, to try to answer the question "if it’s not racism, why do some Americans hate President Obama so much?"

The online article touting yesterday's show actually featured a link to a piece here at Brown Man Thinking Hard from last year, titled "Obama Hate: "Obama Loves America Like O.J. Loved Nicole". Even though I'd never done a group discussion via phone on live radio, it seemed to be right up my alley.

Now I've got an idea of what a rookie must feel like when he hits the floor for the first time in a big time Division I basketball program.

The producers or production assistants over in England were very nice and unfailingly polite. It was so interesting hearing the tart, lilting way their tongues herded each word in a sentence along, with an extra lash for the final word if they were asking a question, that it was a struggle to pay attention to what they were saying to me at first.

The guests were a mixed bag - a reverend/political activist from Louisiana, a radio host from Cincinnati, a reporter/columnist from L.A., and a newspaper person whose title I can't remember. The host was pretty good, keeping the show moving by alternating between our comments, real time emails that he read on the air if they illuminated a point someone had made, or took the conversation in a more interesting direction, and call-in listeners from around the world, although most of ours were from the States.

But back to this rookie thing.

I have a new level of respect for the amount of time Sean Yoes gives me twice a month on the AFRO/First Edition at WEAA to basically say what I want to say, at a pace with which I'm comfortable. My fellow panelists yesterday were old hands at this, experienced enough to know how to use their "radio" voices to elbow their way into the ring to say something. So I didn't get to say much. And they all seemed to lead with their standard talking points, which got me hot under the collar after awhile.

It was as if I was listening to a chorus of Baghdad Bob's, each of them valiantly pursuing their line of patter as if the host had simply gotten bad information about the racial overtones that are becoming more distinct in the criticism of President Obama by certain Americans.

It's moments like these when I feel a little guilty for falling down on the job sometimes, for not coming up with more posts on more topics, for not hitting the bricks here each and every day to try to counter some of the misinformation that so often becomes the dominant discussion by the media.

When I asserted that FOX News was unprecedented in its nightly vitriol against Obama, a chorus of voices raised to denounce MSNBC's treatment of President Bush, as if Keith Olbermann's rants were the equivalent of FOX's entire lineup, hour after hour, yelling about our "Muslim, radical" president.

The guy from L.A., Ben Shapiro, used the phrase "radical policies" so many times I thought the topic had changed and we were talking about another country. As I sat there, phone to my ear, I pictured a computer server somewhere, silently tallying all the on-air uses of these kind of key phrases and relaying the running totals via Blackberries or IPhones to the army (and it IS an army) of right wing political zealots across the country in front of TV cameras and on radio shows, helping them to calibrate their patter accordingly in order for the group to hit their daily target.

Later in the show, when I actually tried to talk about some of the research on race and politics I'd done for a blog series last year, the Cincinnati radio jock jumped in to agree with my assessment that the number of actual racists were small before quickly adding dismissively "that these are people who have no power."

I countered "but when the people in power let these people speak unfettered in this country, that's a problem." I was a statement Mr.Cinncinati took personally.

I actually wasn't talking about anyone down at his level, though. When Mr. Cincinnati calmed down, I told him "It's not you, but the people who run our media companies." When the executive suite allows this kind of ridiculous behavior to typify their networks, THAT is a real problem, one all of us should be up in arms about.

But I was glad to hear Mr. Cincinnati get all huffy for a moment or two before he segued back into his stock speech for someone with a different point of view.

It was the moment that made the whole hour worthwhile.

I'll be back.






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It's bad for this president to bow to the Japanese, but it's good for the last president to kiss the Saudis.

With that kind of logic, I'd hate to think what President Obama should do for the Chinese.

After all, what's a couple of trillion between friends? Especially when we haven't got the cash to pay that "couple of trillion" in Treasury debt off that the Chinese seem to be patiently holding while we make our bankers richer fix our economy.

Between the punditocracy who pray at the church of "American superiority", and the punditocracy who worship Saint Sarah's every breath, I have been totally uninspired these last few days.

Our news media is suffering from a inability to reference anything other than itself, which means that there is probably going to be nothing but an endless loop of President Obama bowing to the Chinese emperor, Sarah Palin gossiping about her alternate universe, Levi Johnston struggling to express himself in front of a camera, and a hundred television reporters and experts analyzing THEIR OWN COMMENTS on this madness as if that is supposed to explain why these things should be important to us. But how much more do I really need to know about this stuff?

So I went to China myself to see what was really going on.

First stop, China Digital Times. The biggest issue in this publication is a raging debate about the Great Firewall of China. The internet there is very, very heavily censored by the state.

From Chinese twitterers:

@zhengyun: President Obama arriving China with the his spectacular army of Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, Google Picasa, Youtube, Yahoo! meme ……

@philfenghan I will not forget this morning, I heard, on my shaky Internet connection, a question about our own freedom which only a foreign leader can discuss.
我不会忘记这个中午，断断续续听着一个他国领导人才会讲到的关于我们自己切身自由的问题。 #obama

@hecaitou: The Netease page about Obama answering the question of Great Firewall of Twitter survived twenty seven minutes.
网易关于奥巴马回答防火墙和Twitter的页面，存活了27分钟。

@blogtd: #Obama President Obama, if you cannot update your Twitter and Facebook while you are in China, I will be happy to provide humanitarian aid.

I am no foriegn policy analyst by a long shot, but as a life long student of human behavior, it looks to me that China is going to have to figure out if they really want to grow the ranks of their middle class citizens, which has been the source of stability in Westernized nations, or keep the type of totalitarian control they have now. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Emperor

And in case the Emperor isn't paying attention, our bowing president would be only too happy to take back boatloads of bright Chinese students to study in our universities.

I made a few other stops, at places like the Angry Chinese Blogger, but the picture of a country that restricted its citizens internet access had a hold on me. I thought about our freedom here to make fun of the president, or complain about the government. I thought about the freedom we have to support who we want for president, for congress, for the senate, for mayor or city councilman.

So I guess I'll be lumping it with the rest of you, enduring Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston as long as the people who sell us stuff figure they can make some money from our eyeballs.

I'll be suffering in the name of freedom.






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It just so happens that I was on the phone yesterday with a staffer from www.RedBrownandBlue.com, asking her about the reception they'd gotten from the black bloggers they'd reached out to recently as they launched their publication - we ended up talking about some of the very same attitudes towards our Latino brethren that cost Lou Dobbs his job today at CNN.

"Every...what's the phrase now...'undocumented worker'...every 'undocumented worker' is alright when they are cutting your grass or cleaning your house," I said to her. "If these 'undocumented workers' can do the work, and we want them to do the work, why can't they be 'citizens' and pay some taxes?"

I told her I was going to add their site to my blogroll. "Immigration is the next big issue coming up in Congress" the staffer reminded me. "Uh huh," I said. "I know. I might be interested in doing a column. Is that okay?"

She assured me that they were always on the lookout for good writing on relevant issues.

"Some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving," Mr. Dobbs said on his show tonight.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ExecuSpeak, the English translation of Dobbs statement is "they told me to take my crabby ass home."

Dobbs may have quit today, but he had painted himself into a corner long ago.

Good riddance.

Sometimes, though, in a situation like this, you wonder, when a person like Dobbs leaves, if you are losing the devil you know to gain the devil you don't.

It's highly unlikely they will get anyone as cantankerously wrong as Dobbs.

But back to this new kid on the block, www.RedBrownandBlue.com...

...I'll have to admit that it was the name that drew me in. In fact, I had just spoken to my brother about this during our discussion the other day about the city of Atlanta mayoral race. "The only thing the AJC kept talking about were black and white voters," I groused. "The good only simplicity of the binary existence is all they want to deal with. I guess it makes for an easier story to report. But what about the Mexicans? What about the Asians? What about the Eastern Europeans? What about the Ethiopians? Did any of these campaigns have a significant presence on their campaign staffs of Spanish speaking people?"

Multiculturalism is more than a trendy moniker. It is a reality here in Atlanta. With the small number of votes cast in the mayor's race, I believe Kasim Reed, who so far is still my fantasy candidate (since I don't live in the city limits), would have had a chance to be the mayor last week if he had included a strong outreach effort to these communities.

To the people who feel a little discombobulated right now by all of this - to the people who want all of us brown and browners to hide under a rock somewhere, or go jump off a cliff en masse, or just simply assume our usual position of deference, waiting for them to take the lead, I'm not sorry to say it, I'm happy as hell to shout it - you are going to discombobulated for the rest of your lives.

And if you haven't visited one of my long time blogroll members Adventures Of The Coconut Caucus - "we put the panic in Hispanic" - you need to check them out. They are hilarious!









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I've been toying around with some comments on the Obama campaign documentary that aired last week, but every time I got started on them, something else came up. Election Night. The Fort Hood shootings. The healthcare bill passing in the House of Representatives. The latest goings on in the Atlanta mayoral race.

Now that there is a lull in the action, maybe I can get back to By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, the documentary directed by Alicia Sams and Amy Rice that HBO premiered last week.

Maybe it's the fiction writer in me, but somewhere around the forty five minute mark in By The People , I wondered how much more this would really resonate with viewers if, instead of watching this solo on a single TV screen, everyone who viewed it was sitting in front of a bank of flat screens, with the Obama documentary playing alongside Amistad, Roots, The March on Washington, Birth of A Nation and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the sound turned down on all of the screens except for By The People, the images of the past flashing across the screens in your periphery as you watched the main event, creating the most meta of meta-narratives you had ever seen...

...and even then, I don't think any stretch of video tape could possibly begin to contain the enormity of the idea of a black man being the president of the United States of America.

For me, what this documentary showed more than anything was how constrained we are as a nation by the febrile and inadequate imaginations of our media, a group of people who often pat themselves on the back for their self described open mindedness when they are usually the most narrow minded link in the information chain.

Add to that the endless hours of cable news punditry that was dedicated to the fluff, gossip and innuendo rather than the things that really wins campaigns, the nuts and bolts business of organizing and registering people to actually cast a ballot, and it becomes apparent why we hold the news media in such low esteem, even as we take our cues from them, for we are too lazy or too preoccupied to search out the raw facts and analyze them for ourselves.

I wrote over a hundred thousand words during the presidential primaries and the presidential election last fall. And in going back through all of them to put together a retrospective ebook culled from this very blog - an effort which is a lot harder and is taking a lot longer than I thought it would have three weeks ago - I got a chance to relive some of the feelings I had during this ground breaking and historic race.

In some ways it was like being in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant while top chefs prepared a ten course meal - seeing all the hard work and planning that went into it made the end result all that much sweeter.

By the end of By The People, you sense that the editors have done their job well, because they have strung enough emotional wellspring moments together to have you yourself get a little misty eyed when they show Candidate Obama tearing up on stage the day before the election while he speaks of the death of his grandmother.

The most poignant part of the film for me was an unremarkable moment early on, when the cameras were whirring in the Obama kitchen, taking in the sight of Michelle Obama playing a game with her children at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Daughter Sasha rushed to the phone, her eyes glancing into the camera to her right before remembering to look away as if the camera wasn't there.

It was a telling reminder of the way we are all influenced by the presence of recording devices, and how our real life instincts are often muted when someone is watching us. The lives of the Obama family have been forever altered by this election. Every once in awhile, when I see a moment like the one young Sasha had during this film, I want to believe that we can give them their real lives back after this is all over.

But the reality is, we will be watching this family for a long time to come.











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Miles Davis might have had the right idea.

Sometimes you just need to turn your back to the audience and blow.

Bwwwwwwaaaap!

What is going on behind the scenes in the city of Atlanta's mayoral race?

Bwwwwwwaaaap!

Can Kasim Reed win without the help of the Maynard Jackson Amen corner?

Bwwwwwwaaaap!



Even though I don't live in the city of Atlanta, what goes on there is important to me and the other four million people who live in the Atlanta metro area that surrounds the city limits.

My brother, who does live inside the city limits, says voting was very light in his precinct in the Atlanta's northwest quadrant. "You had to stand in line when I voted here last fall," he said. "Last week I breezed in and out."

Why more of those newly registered Obama voters didn't return is not really a mystery.

I'd like to say that I don't understand why Kasim Reed, the candidate I still like despite the Jackson endorsement, didn't decide to adopt more of the proven winning strategies of the Obama presidential campaign, but I've got a theory about his lackluster performance last week.

It's an idea that began growing in my mind about the time that I heard Brooke Jackson-Edmonds, daughter of Atlanta's first black mayor, on the radio in the last days of the campaign, endorsing Reed as if she was a proxy for her late father.

Reed is a young, vigorous, well educated, clean cut candidate who can crisply articulate his ideas - the kind of African American candidate who could have taken advantage of the huge contingent of Obama organizers and campaign volunteers who live in the city to significantly boost turnout numbers.

Why didn't Reed have better voter turnout numbers? Is it because his advisors still meet at Paschal's and The Beautiful Restaurant, instead of emailing and conference calling?

There's more to it, though, than slapping an "e" in front of your campaign and slapping up a website. To gain access to this new force in American politics, Reed probably would have had to change his message a little bit too, to be more overtly inclusive of those white voters who feel their voices have gotten the short end of the stick at City Hall ever since Jackson was mayor in the seventies.

How bad could it be in the "City Too Busy To Hate" to have white and Latino and Asian Atlanta residents involved in significant numbers at meaningful levels of city government...

...unless your candidacy has been anointed by a clique that thinks it owns the keys to the city?

Jim Galloway, who writes the "Political Insider" column for the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, published eye opening emails between Bunnie Jackson-Ransom, Maynard Jackson's first wife, and other concerned citizens about the possibility of Atlanta having a white mayor. Galloway would probably lose his job for writing what I'm about to say, but somebody has to say it.


Maynard Jackson is dead.


Because it seems that within the city limits of Atlanta, there are too many people who won't let the spectre of Maynard Jackson's legacy as the first black mayor of Atlanta go. Too many people who are invested in trying to make the historical significance of Jackson's 1973 style of decision making remain relevant here in 2009, some thirty eight years later.

The unique time that the seventies in the South presented were perfectly suited to the young Jackson's talents. A son of the city, who appeared to inherit much of his political skill from his grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson didn't crack open the doors for minority participation in city business and city contracts - he blew them wide open, probably because that's the only way he had a chance of changing the status quo.

There's no way to know, no matter how much Monday morning quarterbacking you do, what might have happened to the city of Atlanta if Jackson had possessed a more diplomatic touch, but a look at just about every major urban city that was taken over by black mayors in the seventies will show you that white flight was a phenomenon that affected all of these locales. Losing that part of the tax base crippled most of these cities just when they needed money the most, making it next to impossible for these administrations to keep the pace with the kind of amenities the suburbs had to offer.

Maybe I am particularly sensitive to these kinds of black political machinations swirling around the Atlanta mayoral race because I grew up in a college town with two historically black colleges whose administrations, staff and faculty formed their own insular communities. The college presidents in the old days ran their campuses as veritable fiefdoms, doling out favors and privileges as if they owned their schools, Booker T. Washington style.

A buddy of mine from my hometown asked me years ago how come we didn't live on Atlanta's South Side. How come we didn't consider the Cascade Road area, where a lot of Atlanta's old school movers and shakers lived. "Because I didn't move here all the way from South Carolina to stand at the back of another Negro pecking order line."

A lot has changed in the thirty five years since Jackson was first elected mayor of Atlanta. Some of the walls between America's racial and ethnic cultures have begun to crumble. Things obviously aren't perfect - there are those who call themselves Tea Baggers or Tea Partiers or freedom fighters who are fighting mightily to rebuild those walls that deny non-whites access to power, walls a young Maynard Jackson did a lot to help crumble.

I don't begrudge Ms. Jackson-Ransom or any of the Jackson family and friends for any success or riches they may have garnered because of Maynard Jackson's three terms as mayor or from the many powerful connections he made while serving in office. That's the reality of the political process - "he who wins receives the spoils." And I'm sure the death threats against the Jackson family in the seventies were every bit as real as the ones against President Obama today.

But the handwriting is on the wall.

Without a vibrant city center as a magnet, the Atlanta metro area will devolve into nothing more than an agglomeration of five counties, their tip ends circling the perimeter like charred logs around an extinguished campfire.

Jacksonites, it's time to step aside and make way for the next generation of young political lions to challenge the status quo downtown, the same way Maynard Jackson did 38 years ago, so that ALL the players in the Atlanta of the new millennium can have a seat at the table.







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It looks like the Affordable Healthcare For America Act, better known as the "healthcare act" if you support it, or "Obamacare" if you are against it, will live to see another day as it moved forward from the House of Representatives about 11 o'clock last night, passing with a final vote of 220 - 215. The bill will head to the Senate next, where legislators will repeat the same three ring circus act again to see if the bill can find enough support among the 100 members of its body to continue on the arduous journey of becoming the law of the land.

You know you're getting old when you look forward to watching the healthcare vote in the House of Representatives on a Saturday evening instead of Saturday Night Live.

Last night, the majority of the Democrats in the House looked like they had Saturday Night Fever - indeed, some of them seemed ready to start dancing in the aisles as the electronic vote totals began to accumulate on the tote board. They had withstood the last minute challenge the Stupak-Pitts Amendment presented Friday night, rallying around the House Democratic leadership's decision to allow an up or down vote on including in the Affordable Healthcare For Americans Act language that prohibits federal funds for abortion services in the public option and in the insurance "exchange" the bill would create.

What this latest wrinkle in the healthcare debate means for the general public is that for the next few weeks, political advertising will compete with holiday season commercials for your attention as special interest groups pull out all the stops in an attempt to sway public support in a direction beneficial to their own self interests.

President Obama released a statement shortly after the vote. "Thanks to the hard work of the House, we are just two steps away from achieving health insurance reform in America. Now the United States Senate must follow suit and pass its version of the legislation. I am absolutely confident it will, and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year."







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It is a cruel kind of sadness that the families of the dead at Fort Hood will have to endure. I would not want to see the story of the military gunman who opened fire on his fellow soldiers yesterday incessantly played and replayed on all the news stations for the next two weeks if I were a surviving family member.

Even as I write these words, there are news producers in studios across the country who are estimating how much of a ratings spike this horrific event will give them the next few days. There are Aryan brotherhoods who are incorporating Major Nidal Malik Hasan's name into their recruitment speeches. Muslim American soldiers who are steeling themselves for a potential backlash within the ranks of their own fellow troops.

These are the kind of real life things, real life but nonsensical, that will go on the next few weeks.

The blood has long stopped flowing from the bullet holes in those thirteen people who died yesterday. The eviscerated flesh around the edges of their wounds have begun to harden. Loved ones, still in shock, are having to scurry about, quietly digging up life insurance policies, forlornly selecting the last pieces of clothing their dead family members will ever wear in this world.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

From Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant

I was required to memorize the phrases above by Bryant almost thirty years ago in high school. It is in times like this that it comes back to me, as clearly as if I had only committed it to memory yesterday.

Yesterday, as I turned the channel to get away from scenes of the chaos, in my mind's eye those thirteen people whose lives were so suddenly snatched from them took their own chambers in the silent halls of death.







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