OBAMA AND “BLACKNESS”

I find the criticisms of Barak Obama for being “too white” that come from some “black” so-called “leaders” and commentators, unbelievably insulting and disappointing.

Except for the personal asides from his wife that he concurs with, I guess to seem more “regular” (like admitting to leaving his dirty socks lying around and having bad breath in the morning!), Obama displays the kind of erudition and dignity, intelligence and commitment, that was emblematic of many “black” men and women pre-mid-1960s, men and women who risked being beaten and jailed and even murdered, in the struggle to achieve civil rights for “black” people, equal to those of “whites.”

What is now often seen as “black” came partly from the Black Panther movement and the “Black Power” espousing student leaders of more radical “black” groups that began popping up in the late 1960s. Many of these leaders, though “middle-class” and college educated—what often was referred to during those times, and still, as “booshie” (short for “booshwa”—okay I’m not good at spelling French words) adopted the speech patterns and poses of black street thugs, the kind of “bad” n-words (how “booshie” does “n-word” sound?) that used to throw such a fright into most “whites” that they often ended up railroaded into jail and/or prison, or chased out of town or lynched by a mob, following usually false charges having something to do with “white” women.

That tactic, of adopting the bad street n-word speech and style, worked, especially at getting more media attention—and partly as a result, the “black” college-student posers influenced “black” culture, and the poets and proto-rappers of the time adopted much of that style, which in turn influenced the rappers and hip hoppers who followed.

Bill O’Reilly’s recent astonishment over the “normal”-ness of the diners in a predominantly black restaurant in Harlem (parodied beautifully on a recent John Stewart show), exclaiming over the fact that they were just like normal “white” people eating dinner in a restaurant, shows how well that “black” street image has permeated our society.

It’s ludicrous, of course, in the age of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Barak Obama, let alone the decades of Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, Leontyne Price, et.al. to assume that African-American culture and society is represented by Snoop Dog and Fifty Cents.

And even if Snoop and “fiddy” represented what is most “real” about “black” culture, they aren’t the street thugs they may, or may not, once have been. They and/or most successful rappers own their own businesses—clothing lines and recording companies, etc.—and make more money individually than probably the entire populations of various urban “ghettoes” in cities around the U. S.

And as for the “blackness” of that style, there are probably more young white men who posture in ways that makes them more authentically “black” than Obama supposedly does. So “white” no longer means “white”—as if it ever did in this amalgamated culture—and “black,” as defined by too many knuckleheads like O’Reilly up until his recent epiphany that yes, “black” people do eat dinner sitting up and with knives and forks (as the Stewart show parody revealed), and reinforced by supposed “street” biases, has more to do with pretending to be lower class and regimented into allowing yourself only limited expressions and tastes, whether they be from the realm of rap or soul or down home or church

If it has to pass a litmus test of “black”-ness, it mis-represents what is actually and indeed authentically and non-monolithically “black” about this culture that we all share aspects of.

And that is, like I said, insulting and disappointing.