Ignace’s Weblog

The discussion of the New Yorker cover featuring Senator Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim of Southwest Asia or East Africa and Michelle Obama dressed as a Black Liberation Fighter with full Afro and AK47 has taken primarily two tracts: the inability to appreciate the satirical intent of the cartoon exactly to condemn the politics of fear, or the bad taste, insensitivity and poor judgment of the New Yorker for publishing the drawing. Both tracts center their discussions, understandably, on the possible impacts on the presidential campaign. Lost, or at least submerged, in the discussion is the Michelle Obama part of the equation of the fear politics, U.S. fear of Black radicalism, U.S. fear of black anger, and thus the persistence of racism. She had the gall to admit that she has not always been proud of her country’s behavior. Imagine that.

Imagine that.

The political right represents Black anger as unjustified, irresponsible, and a security risk. The political center and the center-left represent Black anger as perhaps justified for class reasons, but irresponsible, and a political risk as it mobilizes reactionary action from the White working and middle classes who should be in solidarity with the Black working and middle classes. That narrow political spectrum casts persistent Black disenfranchisement, poverty, alienation as essentially behavioral problems. If Black people stop acting the way they do, they too can succeed, a usefully vague notion. So the race that Americans want to take them beyond race turns on race and U.S. inability or unwillingness to address racism, the real “race” problem.

Now, during the week of the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama’s keynote speech Monday night played the familiar notes of American Exceptionalism, the narrative of uniquely American working class and middle class possibilities for upward mobility and wealth if one works hard enough and sacrifices enough. Michelle Obama emphasized, for example, how her story and her husband’s story are so similar: her raised working class on the Southside of Chicago, and him raised by a single mother, perhaps the only single mother in recent history who Americans have been asked to feel for, and her parents, working class white people. The message was clear: we are really all the same; we Black people are just like you White people.

Revealingly, the mainstream media picked up this sameness theme and framed it as a necessary humanizing of Michelle Obama, that indeed, she had to demonstrate to the American people, which really means most of the 80 percent white electorate, that she and her husband and their daughters are just like other Americans, that they love each other, work hard, believe in God, love their country, are Americans. Consider this: 8 out of every 10 voters in the U.S. are white. A significant number of these 8 voters need to be shown that Black people are human like them. That is what it means to humanize people, isn’t it, to make them more human in some one else’s eyes? How were they perceived before they were humanized? How do Whites really see Blacks if in the week when Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech on the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington, his wife still needed to be humanized, and this is taken as necessary and serious politics?

But we are Americans. Malcolm understood that, what that means culturally, the way in which African Americans have created, developed, forged, cultivated, scratched out – which metaphor?- an identified and indentifying culture only possible under these unique conditions of U.S. political and social history. We live with the doubleness. It marks us. It marks our modernity. Henry Louis Gates and others remind us of the creole character of our culture, often as a critique of the Afrocentric, the essentialist. But creole-ness has not weakened the magnetic pull of Africa, and American-ness continues to complicate how one lives with the pull. We live doubled.

This not the South( thank you JVDZ).

This is not the South either.

So what did Malcolm mean?

Josh Howard of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks has been in the news this week for disrespecting the national anthem over summer. The clip has been bouncing around YouTube.

Howard has been roundly criticized and denounced, reminded that he owes so much to this country, a country that has allowed him to earn millions of dollars at his profession. But many African Americans agree with Howard. African American citizenship is still problematic, unsettled, in question. Howard’s comments emerge from a discourse of opposition that has been a central theme of African American resistance and counter memory. Expressions of Black anger, of Black critique of the mainstream narrative of the U. S. troubles the plantation,the quarters and the big house. Americans, black and white, don’t like to remember.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, discussing Bourdieu’s concept of the unthinkable explains, “The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased”. He goes on to explain that this exactly describes the Haitian Revolution and the ongoing silences about that revolution. It is a silence that continually muffles discourses of black Resistance, erased from mainstream discourse and often relegated to legend or “mere rhetoric” in black communities.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, these men and the men and women they led saw themselves as rising to their historic roles in a revolutionary period, actors in the Caribbean phase of the French Revolution. Revolutionary France was ultimately unable to come to terms with African freedom in the Caribbean and under Napoleon attempted to reinstate slavery. The Haitian defeat of France, and England, and Spain in their attempts to fill the vacuum left by the French, shook the slave-ocracy of the young American republic. But the U.S. had its own problems, its own history of uprisings, its own grumbling slaves and natives. Theirs are the silenced narratives. They make Americans uncomfortable. They should. Josh Howard is a reminder, including his comments about the Obama campaign. How will Obama’s campaign and possible presidency be used to regulate African American dissent from the mainstream? Not everyone is drinking the kool-aid. “No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism…I’m speaking as a victim of this American system…And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American Dream; I see an Amercan nightmare.” from The Ballot or the Bullet, delivered April 3, 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio.

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