Entries Tagged 'Race' ↓

Barack Obama. (Photo by Damon Winter for The New York Times)

Fascinating piece in The New York Times about the challenge Barack Obama faces, not only, externally, to his ascendency, but also internally, from himself.

In the way Mr. Obama has trained himself for competition, he can sometimes seem as much athlete as politician. Even before he entered public life, he began honing not only his political skills, but also his mental and emotional ones. He developed a self-discipline so complete, friends and aides say, that he has established dominion over not only what he does but also how he feels. He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.

“He doesn’t inhale,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist.

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When Hillary Clinton needed to bring her Democratic National Convention speech to a crescendo Tuesday night, she did so the way a lot of politicians do these days: By quoting a dead, much-bedraggled, poor Black person.

In this case, the honor fell on Harriet Tubman, above, the noted abolitionist whose exploits made the Underground Railroad legendary:

My mother was born before women could vote. My daughter got to vote for her mother for president. This is the story of America, of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.

So how do we give this country back to them? By following the example of a brave New Yorker, a woman who risked her lives to bring slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice: “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”

And even in the darkest moments, that is what Americans have done. We have found the faith to keep going.

Wow…. Lovely words. Powerful, even.

But Tubman never said them.

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Long before its scheduled March 2009 release, Resident Evil 5 (RE5), the next installment in the immensely popular and influential survival-horror videogame series, started coughing up blood…and controversy: In the narrative, a white protagonist, Chris Redfield, sets down in what appears to be an African or Caribbean country decimated by a mutant “supervirus.” Suddenly, freshly dead villagers start to revive as bloodthirsty zombies, and Redfield must slaughter them in hordes to stay alive, a la this scene, below, from the game trailer.

Perhaps Newsweek‘s gaming critic, N’Gai Croal, giving pointed regard to the clip’s images, with their precedents in racist visual history, said it most succinctly in an excellent MTV Online interview: “Clearly no one Black worked on this game.”

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Sign me up: Obama protesters in St. Petersburg FL

“WHAT ABOUT THE BLACK COMMUNITY, OBAMA?” So asked members of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, or InPDUM, above, via a large white banner, identical to that in the photo, this past Friday, August 1, during an Obama campaign town hall meeting at the Gibbs High School gym in St Petersburg FL.

The group, according to CNN, consisted of “three young African-American protestors, and two white women.” (“White women,” not protesters? Why not “good white women of our fair city”? What is this: The Scottsboro Boys?)

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Without even a comment, Ray Winbush sent me the link to Jay Smooth’s most recent illdoctrine vlog post, “How To Tell People They Sound Racist.”

Oh, my: It’s a thing of beauty.

No, scratch that: It’s almost a piece of counter-racist science.

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It takes a lot for me to watch white people dance with Black people and forget that I’m watching white people dance with Black people. Target’s “Happy Together” spot, agencied by Wieden + Kennedy Portland (of NIKE fame) and directed by Mike Maguire, doesn’t come close, but may be pointed in the right direction. (YouTube has it linked to the screenshot, above. However, I’d suggest you check out the QuickTime on the Coloribus.com web site, which is, as well as being clearer, downloadable.)

And since you’ve been wondering, the sexy track and video is “Calabria 2007” by Enur feat. Natasja.

Also, did you notice the line we just crossed?

This is MEDIA ASSASSIN’s 250th post!

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McDonald’s “mixed race” “cha cha slide” kid

“The biracial look is in vogue in advertising. The process of changing racial definitions continues, and dramatic new developments may be on the horizon.”—Anthony J. Cortese, Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 113

Always count on BlackCommentator.com to, once again, boldly go: “Biracial is the New Black,” by K. Danielle Edwards, laments what the author sees as a new light-skinned color standard for Black people in advertising and related contexts:

What’s up with all the olive-skinned, spiral-curled, hazel-, blue- and green-eyed folks standing in for black people in commercials and print advertisements these days?
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Not exactly the best white father to his Black sons: Thomas Jefferson

Jesse Jackson was completely and absolutely correct: Of course, Barack Obama was, and is, talking down to Black people. If there’s any doubt about this, compare the tenor of very first major speech he gave after he effectively captured the Democratic nomination—one to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) Annual Policy Conference on June 4th—to that of the one he gave at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago on Father’s Day, June 15th.

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Bele (Frank Gorshin), Star Trek, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”

Surprise, surprise: Even with Barack Obama’s pleas against “divisiveness” and affirmations that we are “one people,” a New York Times/CBS News poll reveals what everybody, especially Black people, knows: The needle hasn’t been budged an inch, and Americans, white and non-white, still see the issue of race in an almost opposing way.

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics — Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years.

Indeed, the poll showed markedly little change in the racial components of people’s daily lives since 2000, when The Times examined race relations in an extensive series of articles called “How Race Is Lived in America.”

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Come on: I get it that, right about now, Ebony is probably starving for any kind of contact with Obama, or for any reason to put him on the cover, but seriously….

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