Marc,
Excellent counter-point and you've definitely got jokes. But if you think Obama doesn't know the difference between Jay-Z and Jay Leno you're sadly mistaken; the truth is that Obama is the only candidate on the planet that can appeal to both of their audiences.
Uh not so much Ken. If he can appeal to both, he tries very hard to not let the "dark horse" (aka his blackness) catch up to him around the corner. I know for one if I had to hide my blackness so hard that I needed to avoid my most fervent supporters as if they had the plague, I'd take to smoking,
Anyway, thanks Marc, for the reality check. And the "pimping the ho...pes" pun made my day, intentional or not!
I find it odd that Obama is being constantly accused of "hiding his blackness". What in hell is "blackness" anyway? I assume people mean cultural habits that are common to American blacks. However, Obama has had an almost unique set of circumstances that have formed his personality and outlook on life & politics. I, for one, don't want a "black" president, I want an hororable and wise president who cares about all of our citizens, and the citizens of the world. If we can get that then "black issues" will be taken care of because these so called black issues are, in many respects, class issues. I have yet to hear an argument as to how Obama should be conducting himself or what issues he is not addressing or skirting around. And besides...all blacks (people) should be voting for Obama anyway...what are your other options? Clinton? McCain? Yeah, right.
I forgot about Nader...he is actually the best option, but for some reason (i.e. stupidity) he can't get enough support.
We are NEVER going to eradicate racism, or stupidity for that matter, so we need someone who champions equal justice (legal, financial, etc...) across the board.
By the way, I'm 100% certain that Obama knows the difference between Jay Leno and Jay-Z...are you kidding me?
My brother, you need to change barbershops. If that little story was true, where do you and your fellow patrons live? You mean there really are people who still think we are going back to Africa? *LOL*
PingBack from http://jay-z.blog4evar.info/?p=2251
Stop thinking that Barack is ignorant. He is a brillant man, smarter than you or me. He was in front of a very black audience in Raliegh, and he wanted to give a quick and silent shout out. Hate not, the first hip hop head in the White House! Have you seen the you tube videos, I like the one where he is literally brushing Hill, Bill, George, and company off his shoulders. Calm down, have some fun, and admit that that *&^% was hillarious.
Senator Barack Obama & Hip-Hop 2008 President Super tuesday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSVG7jRp_g
Snapple??? And you accuse Barack of sending signals that he's not "too black"? Isn't there an old saying about the pot & the kettle?
Barack Obama & Hip-Hop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSVG7jRp_g&NR=1
"And besides...all blacks (people) should be voting for Obama anyway...what are your other options? Clinton? McCain? Yeah, right."
Uh, no! All blacks (people) should vote for ANY candidate that they feel would best qualify for the position of president of the United States. In my opinion, I still don't trust any of the candidates, and the sad thing is there are no other options for me. Instead of Democrats coming together and supporting either candidate without repercussions to try to get the Repugnants out of office, every one candidates and their supporters are acting like pure animals, and it's a serious turn-off for me. Democrats are losing focus whether they want to admit it or not. Concentrate on fighting these ignorant Repugnants, not going to the point of insulting each other. Both Obama and Clinton have the same ideas--how in the world did it get to this point? This has gotten so out of control, it's ridiculous! But yet, people are loving it.
So go ahead and keep it up so people will get to the point of being so tired and disgusted by the nasty mud-slingings going on that they'll put that old lame McCain in office.
Hmm! You drink Snapple! Hmm! Snapple drinkers are HRC supporters. That's from my own unscientific poll. I need to update.
Can you pinpoint exactly when Obama knew that black folks were going to vote for him? According to all of the stories and polling data I looked at Obama did not get a boost in support from black voters until after the Iowa caucuses. You don't have to support Obama but I wish that you wouldn't make things up to bolster your position. No sweat, no strain.
I don't know Marc . . . that post is reaching. It is not uncommon for us to exaggerate in the Barbershop, and I would really like that to think that we're not so jaded and desperate that we still believe that a "black face in a high place" means much to us!
Marc, I have to agree with Melissa, Obama said, "You have to" and then brushed his shoulders off, If that wasn't enough he repeated the motion and said "Thats what you gotta do." not "have to do" "gotta do" sounds like "You gotta get ..." from the Jay Z lyric. His first brush was a little sloppy showing hes a rookie and he was trying it out, besides we all know he cant dance, Ellen is better than him, but the gesture was made to the hip-hop generation, no doubt!
Negro smoke signals.
That's funny.......
The fact that 'black people will vote for him anyway' makes it even more unfortunate that their candidate was so irresponsible with their hopes and dreams. He could have worked with his Party to secure a nomination in the near future, not at the same time as an a serious fellow minority politician was also running. Splitting the party? That'll be 'Barry.'
Hey struck off; read King's "Why we cant' wait" and get a flavor of why Obama should not be an obediant little boy and wait till his turn is announced by someone else. If he did that, he'd never get the chance. You're talking about what? 8 years for Clinton then the obliatory run by Clinton's vice president. That is IF she wins. By that time the pendulum will have swung and another rethug will be knocking. Besides Hillary is hated by more people than dislike Obama.
the pimp thing will soon be brought up if any republicans are reading this as opposition research, stupid stupid stupid o!
I am soooooo sick and tired of black people, even well educated black people, saying what "Black" is! I grew up in what would be considered "the hood," and yet do not exhibit "blackness" on a level that is acceptable to some of the folks where my mother lives. We have to stop defining ourselves by the worst stereotypes! He is an Ivy League educated, well travelled individual. If he acted or sounded like Rayray n'em, I could not, and would not, take him seriously. Blacks come from all corners, and we have to stop accepting the mainstream definition that black = ghetto, hood, ignorant, uneducated, poor, etc. etc. etc.!
If there are spelling errors, it's because, to borrow a term from Ms. Harris-Lacewell, there are flames shooting out of my fingertips! The nonsense!
Republicans will always find something to display their ignorance about. They are the major players in "Normal people -vs- you" politics. They have a whole network dedicated to it. And as another example of opposition idiocy, witness the shoulder brush. Geesh, honestly, W.T.F?
People have been brushing off their shoulders before Jay Z was born and you all know that. There was even a version of the 80's dance the cabbage patch where people brushed their shoulders off but shoulder brushing predates that too. I can only vouch for 1970's Detroit but when someone playing the dozens takes a shot at you, you would brush your shoulders and give a better come-back.
The problem is not Obama displaying aspects of his culture -as some of you would claim- the problem is that so many of our white brothers and sisters have been living in the country but are still ignorant on so many aspects of American culture. They suffer from the luxury of cultural ignorance. This why the news pimps are able to cash in on their weaknesses and fears by playing a snippet of Wright or simply uttering the word farakhan. I can just imagine someone finding an old tape of B.O. when he was 17 on some Chicago basketball court saying "*** please" Imagine the silly outrage from something like that at the expense of what really matters like the economy. Imagine Obama responding to a question of whether he loves debating by proclaiming; "I'm a microphone fiend, I'm gonna smash her next tuesday"
Faux news: <b>Obama admits addiction, threatens Clinton with violence"</B>
Marc, you wrote: "For the past year, Barack has been pimping the hopes and aspirations of people around this nation" .....Say what?
and you say Melissa is reaching. I think you should think about your choice of words in the future. I certainly don't see how any of his moves are pimp like. And I certainly don't feel pimped out as a result of supporting his candidacy.
On another note, one of Obama's favorite tv shows is "The Wire" so it wouldn't be so farfetched to assume he knows about Jay-Z. http://www.motherjones.com/riff_blog/archives/2008/01/6933_barack_obama_sa.html
This is exactly why I think people I think Rev. Wright has the right to speak out and defend himself. Inspite of the fact that I would love to see Obama win the nomination, unlike many other black folk I can't rule out Obama's blind ambition for the Presidency either or his seeming need to gain white folk's blessing by continually denouncing and distancing himself from this black person or that black person. Whether white politicians or black ones black folk have to be vigilant about being taken for granted.
With the sheer nature of politics being less about the issues at hand for the country and more about persona and public perception, its no surprise to see Obama getting the dirt off his shoulder and Hillary "attempting" to down a shot in battleground state Indiana. But in Obama's case, the notion that that gesture was in some way an attempt to "prove his blackness" and gain support from the black community is among the inanities in this campain Obama has decried. Can't he just be cool and funny at a rally? These gestures are just that and not meant to be seen as simple ploys to gain votes. They simply rally supporters and annoy adversaries. So sure hate to say it but I won't be suprised to see Clinton donning a Cosby sweater to court the black and educated vote or Obama chewing tobacco and hit the NASCAR circuit to sway low income whites. Sad state in politics but with no real differences in policy to debate and a cat fight for the superdelegates, we'll see more foolishness and pandering as this campaign comes to a bloody finish. What does it mean to "prove blackness" anyway when the African American experience and existence cannot be defined in such limited terms. He is still treated lke a black man in America with the Rev. Wright controversy, trying to get a taxi, etc because surprise...he's a black man! His background may be different with mixed heritage and a rise on the political scene without involvement or affiliation with the old guard of the civil rights movement but he is in every sense of the word black. Contrary to Marc's commentary alluding to African American's blind allegiance to Obama, it takes more than a hip hop gesture, messages of hope and rallies to win our vote. Obama is a candidate of substance. But he doesn't need me or gestures to defend him, so go on Obama you better get..get...that..that...dirt off your shoulder.
“There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that – they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.” WHITE, Richard Dwyer
There's a lot of talk by whites these days rwegarding Obama and his black supporters about the race card. One thing that’s rarely mentioned or acknowledged is how frequently whites play the non-race card. Whites are raised to believe they have cornered the market in race-neutral logic and that non-whites are incapable of it due to our ‘racially tainted’ perspective. Whites are aware, contemptuously so, of the ethnic prisms of others, including ours, but are generally impervious to their own, so position their perspective as ‘objective’ while relegating all other opinions to the position of ‘subjective’; to be viewed with suspicion, making our opinion the forced “other” in effect.
One way whites play the non-race card: When blacks claim that their race was inappropriately factored into a given situation, whites will accuse blacks of playing the race card, i.e. falsely claiming that race played a role when it actually didn’t. They do so with the presumed authority that supposedly being neutral and non-raced confers. So powerful is this posturing that the possibility that the role racial angle which blacks discerned was invisible to whites, obscured by their ethnic prism, is never even considered. Unless and until whites are made aware of the impact of their own ethnicity on their perspective and instead continue to espouse their purely subjective opinion as if it was rigorously objective - and therefore more reliable - their perspective will lack credibility and their understanding will lack depth.
The most egregious example of the non-race card being played by whites was in the aftermath of the OJ verdict, which was juxtaposed as a contrast between the 'distorted, subjective, illogical, irrational, emotional race-based prism' of blacks versus the 'logical, rational, clearheaded, objective race-neutral non-prism' of whites. “You believe the verdict was right because you’re black”, a white friend told me. “You believe it was wrong because you’re NOT black”, I replied. “Agreed”, he said. “Because you’re WHITE, in other words”, I added. “No! It has NOTHING to do with the fact that I’m white!” he vigorously exclaimed. He does not see that he is also a member of an ethnic subset, who does indeed see the world through his own thickly-layered ethnic prism. It is that collective white prism, not the “facts” surrounding the OJ jury’s verdict – which were hardly explored and barely understood – which united whites in their outrage.
As UCLA law professor Peter Arenella noted: “The case became a metaphor for race relations in this country, primarily because the media itself generated that perspective before the trial ever started. Months before the trial, a New Yorker article talked about how the defense was going to play the "race card" and attack prosecution witnesses and police officers as racist. But the message was that this was a totally inappropriate thing for the defense to do; that this was all about jury nullification. The media didn't educate the public about the possibility that race could play very different nuanced roles in the case; that the racial composition of the jury might aid the jurors in making credibility judgments about the believability of witnesses. The media didn't educate the public about the possibility that race could do anything but play a negative role in the case.”
"On the one hand, the experience of African American jurors aided them in seeing through the lies of Detective Mark Fuhrman and Detective [Philip] Vannatter before the white media ever figured out that the witnesses were lying. That was positive. A classic example of how race improved the jury's deliberations about the credibility of witnesses occurred during F. Lee Bailey's cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman, when Mr. Fuhrman testified for the prosecution. Bailey's cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman asked several critical questions, whose answers led the African American jurors to appreciate long before white America that Fuhrman was lying about his racist past. Bailey asked Mark Fuhrman on cross-examination, "Do you care if people believe mistakenly that you have racist beliefs?" And Fuhrman said matter-of-factly, "No, I don't care." "Do you care that people mistakenly believe that you are willing to frame an innocent man by planting incriminating evidence against him?" And Fuhrman reddened and showed a sense of annoyance and anger and replied, "Yes, that matters to me."
Two African American jurors immediately looked at each other with disgust, because they understood immediately that those differing answers reflected the fact that Fuhrman probably was a racist. They didn't need the tapes. White America and perhaps the one white juror needed to hear those tapes to understand that Mr. Fuhrman was lying on the stand, but the African American jurors already knew. ..."
Did ANY white American, besides Professor Aranella, consider that black jurors would make for a more savvy jury?? No. The assumption, as always, was that white jurors would be better, supposedly because they'd be more 'objective' and less ‘subjective’. It’s also revealing that many prominent legal experts and law professors thought the case, far from being the ‘slam-dunk’ whites seemed convinced it was, was in reality a weak case with serious credibility problems. Here’s how
Peter Aranella neatly summarized it: “Police lied from the beginning of this case to the end, and I'm not talking just about Detective [Mark] Fuhrman lying on the stand about making racist remarks. This case started with a preliminary hearing in which the lead detective made an obvious lie about why they entered Mr. Simpson's property -- pretending he wasn't a suspect -- when the average citizen probably appreciates that in a domestic murder case, the surviving spouse has to be a suspect [and] has to be eliminated.”
Then I carefully researched precisely how the jury arrived at its conclusion and discovered that their process was race- neutral, impartial, sensible, understandable and fair, which begged this question: Why can't/won’t/don’t white Americans believe that? It seemed a clear case of what Professor Donald Jones said: "The white population is responding to this whole thing like it's from another planet,'' said Jones, who avidly followed the Simpson trial. ``It's also the same behavior we all engage in. When someone does something that doesn't conform to our perceptions, we're incredulous, even if the behavioral process that gets them to their conclusion is the same one we would use."
Jury forewoman Amanda Cooley wrote that the juror’s first decision during deliberation was to apply California’s Rules of Evidence, which states that a jury that determines a witness has lied to them in any part of his testimony, as Mark Fuhrman clearly did, could disregard his entire testimony, and any other evidence which originated from that witness. Which is why the jury dismissed his testimony, the hat, the blood, and the gloves. That eviscerated the state’s case. “What about the glove? The hat? The blood?" said whites after the trial, apparently ignorant of the fact that the jury had disregarded that key evidence for proper reasons and in accordance with California’s rules of Evidence.
Why did the presence and involvement of lying cops barely register with whites, let alone cast doubt on the integrity of the entire process and the evidence? Could it be that whites simply don’t believe that cops would lie, while blacks believed they would and did? Is THAT the fault line that led to the post-verdict racial schism? White prismic thinking was evident, not in their belief that OJ was guilty, but rather in the depth, length, and passion they applied to this belief. What other domestic homicide cases in the past 30 years have whites applied such passion to? Phil Spector? Phil Hartman? Claus Von Bulow? What about Mary Ann Kopechne? How about the unfortunate wife of William Burroughs? Murder is "gotten away with" all the time. OJ is reviled out of proportion to other alleged murderers who walked. How were his murders different?
I spent a lot of time working through that aftermath of the OJ verdict and the racial schism it revealed, and trying to understand it. What I learned literally changed my life. The question, for me, was why did almost all white people - regardless of class, or educational level - firmly believe the verdict was a travesty? What factors were capable of uniting their belief systems so unanimously? I was being told by the media, and by white friends, that it was their 'neutrality and objectivity' that united them in their outrage, versus the overtly ridiculed 'pro-black ethnic prism' of black people, including those on the jury, which allegedly united them in their belief that it was the correct verdict.
Not so. As jury forewoman Amanda Cooley pointed out in her book, “After OJ got rich he dumped his BLACK wife and BLACK life for a WHITE wife and a WHITE life in lily-white Brentwood, avoided ‘black’ causes like the plague, and became a classic Oreo (Black on the outside and white on the inside). If the black women on the jury had been ‘Black nationalists’, as people have claimed, we woulda CONVICTED OJ, not found him innocent.”
An ethnic prism peering into a different ethnic prism sees a distortion. Marcia Clark learned that the hard way. She knew Mark Fuhrman, her key witness, was a racist. She had two choices: Hide it from the jury and hope it didn’t come back to bite her, or acknowledge it and move on. She decided the black women on the jury couldn’t handle the truth so she tried to hide it: “If anybody said you’d used the N-word, they’d be lying, right?”, she asked him on the stand. She was lying. She’d read his LAPD file; she knew he’d attempted to get disability from the force by explaining his deep hatred of “ni**ers”. Clark wasn’t that worried though, secure in the knowledge that the defence could never get their hands on that file. But then they got those infamous tapes, which blew the lid off Fuhrman’s perjury and sank the case. Clark made that fateful decision because when she weighed the impact that knowledge would have on black women, she decided it was too explosive. Would it have been catastrophic? No. Knowing that Fuhrman was a racist would not have made the jury dismiss his evidence. As Amanda Cooley said, “Being a racist doesn’t mean you’re a liar. Being a liar does though.”
Fuhrman denied on the stand ever using the word "ni**er" for the previous ten years, yet Fuhrman gave a taped interview in 1985 to Laura Hart McKinny, an aspiring screenwriter working on a screenplay about female police officers. Fuhrman bragged about his membership in the secret organization within the LAPD known as MAW (Men Against Women). In further interviews, Fuhrman bragged about beating and torturing gang members, and was quoted as saying "Yeah we work with ni**ers and gangs. You can take one of these ni**ers, drag 'em into the alley and beat the *** out of them and kick them. You can see them twitch. It really relieves your tension." He went on to say "we had them begging that they'd never be gang members again, begging us". He said that he would tell Blacks, "You do what you're told, understand, ni**er?" Only very limited excerpts of the tapes were admitted as evidence, yet the admitted portions were strong enough to cast doubts on Fuhrman's motives and credibility as a witness and prove he was a perjurer.
“Blacks think race, not us”, whites said after the OJ verdict. Blacks were collectively pilloried by a white constituency that collectively accused blacks of being ‘irrational’ and allowing their ethnic prism to ‘cloud their vision’. Whites were saying of blacks, “they think the verdict was right because they’re black and subjective, and we think it’s a travesty because we’re NOT black and therefore ‘objective’.” Or put another way: “Because we’re white,” ‘white’ encompassing ‘unbiased’ and race-neutral.” But I’d already realized from looking at mock jury research that’s not what white means at all; that's just what whites THINK being white means. In a mock jury trial, researchers act out an entire trial sticking carefully to a script, including witness testimony and cross examination, in front of various mock juries which then vote on guilt or innocence. Then they switch up the race of the defendant and the victim, and sometimes even the witnesses, act out the scripted trial again, and measure if and how those changes affect the juror's verdicts.
Guess what? White males, the (supposedly) most neutral and objective fellows on God's green earth, are in fact the MOST racially biased in mock jury trials. Make the defendant white and the victim black and the "Not Guilty" verdicts flow like the Nile. But use the SAME script verbatim, but change the defendant to 'black' and the victim to 'white' and the "GUILTY" verdicts gush like Niagara Falls. But why would prosecutors want to pack the jury box with the most racially biased jurors around? Prosecutors perpetually violate the law to try to illegally exclude black jurors and pack juries with white jurors, according to the Supreme Court:
"Misuse of the peremptory challenge to exclude black jurors has become both common and flagrant... in 15 criminal cases in 1974 in the Western District of Missouri involving black defendants, prosecutors peremptorily challenged 81% of black jurors). An instruction book used by the prosecutor's office in Dallas County, Texas, explicitly advised prosecutors that they conduct jury selection so as to eliminate "'any member of a minority group.'" In 100 felony trials in Dallas County in 1983-1984, prosecutors peremptorily struck 405 out of 467 eligible black jurors; the chance of a qualified black sitting on a jury was 1 in 10, compared to 1 in 2 for a white."
Why do you think prosecutors do that? I'll tell you why not: Because whites are 'fairer' and 'more objective'. They are NOT. Whites are BY FAR THE MOST RACIALLY BIASED JURORS. Prosecutors know that. That’s why prosecutors love packing their juries with whites. They know they can manipulate and exploit their ethnic prisms and racial bias to get convictions.
That’s when I realized that, post-OJ, what I really witnessed was a clash of ethnic prisms: a black prism, visible to all, colliding with a white prism invisible to whites. That’s when I began to see through the pervasive mythology of white neutrality/objectivity/rationality versus black impartiality/subjectivity/irrationality, to see the role that the ethnic prism of white people played, not only in this but in many of my interactions with them. By positioning their ethnically shaped opinions as ‘objective and untainted’ by their lives and experiences as white people, and positioning mine as a product of my ethnicity, even a hostage to it, their opinions constantly and unfairly occupied the position of ‘the standard’; the objective, the rational, and in the process minimized and marginalized mine as merely the unreliable and suspect product of a person unable to think logically: The Forced ‘Other’.
We cannot continue to allow them to.
