Summer Reading Round-Up

I am leaving for vacation tomorrow and when I get back it'll be just about time for my daughter to start school. It feels like the end of summer. I haven't read nearly all that I wanted to read this summer, but I have did get a few good books in.

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz--This won the Pulitzer last year and was an utter joy to read. The plot follows the sometimes hysterical and always tragic life of Oscar Wao, a Dominican sf enthusiast (some might call him an afrogeek). What I like most about the book are the extensive footnotes that blend fact and fiction and question the very nature of storytelling. The footnotes read like a narrative unto themselves.

Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde--Fforde writes these cool metafictional mystery novels featuring a detective called Thursday Next who investigates crimes in books. The Fourth Bear is the second in a second series, which features Detective Jack Spratt, head of the Nursery Crimes Division. I read the first book and absolutely adored and when I saw the second in the library the other day, I snatched it up. I haven't been able to finish it though and I can quite tell if it’s because it's not quite as good as the first, or because I haven’t been able to get myself into right light summer reading frame of mind.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach-- I heard about her other books (Stiff) and always wanted to read one and then I saw this one on the shelf. It is a good read, especially the parts on early sex researchers, but that may be just because I am endlessly fascinated by Alfred Kinsey. This book was surprisingly unerotic, however, unlike...

Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopdedia of Sex edited by Ellen Sussman--Literally a series of words with definitions, followed by short pieces by contemporary writers. It's erotica for lit geeks and I love it.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer--This has be a total guilty pleasure. My student in Governor's School really liked this book (the whole series, in fact) and insisted that I read it. I resisted because young adult fantasy isn’t really my cup of tea, despite my unabashed love of Harry Potter, and because the book is about a romance between a teenage girl and a vampire, and vampires scare me. Though, to be fair, he is a vegetarian vampire. Anyway, I finally relented and read it and it is just as romance-y and girl-y in all the ways I find problematic, but I loved it. I loved it so much that I immediately read it again once I finished it. It's definitely been my guilty pleasure this summer.

Waiting to be read: Watchmen by Alan Moore and (because, despite the fact that this book has sat on my bookshelf for years unread because I don't like the art, the movie's coming out this year and all the cool kids have read it and I reference it all the time whenever I teach superhero comics I just need to get over myself and read it), When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost: Ahip-hop Feminist Breaks It Down by Joan Morgan (she's coming to the College of Charleston in October to talk about hip hop and feminism--very exciting), A Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and a Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehesi Coates (it's been getting rave reviews and he says that he wanted to write a memoir with the rhythms of hip hop and I really want to see if he pulls it off).

Live Blogging While Watching the Tyra Banks Show

Ok--first of all, I clearly shouldn't be watching the Tyra show. But I'm home during the day for a change and the tv's on and I couldn't resist. So my current state of indignation is my own fault.

The topic today is ethnic names and the show consists of a multiracial group of people sitting around a table making judgments about a non-existent person based on a name. For instance, a girl named Ashleigh is clearly ditsy, promiscuous, materialistic, land ikely to flash her breasts on Girls Gone Wild. Jose is Puerto Rican, uneducated, speaks broken English, and works as a dishwasher or janitor. Or he sells drugs. This has been going on for half an hour now. Who are these people? Why would they voluntarily go on tv and say such ignorant ignorant things?

The issue of names and what people assume about you before they meet you, based on that name, is indeed an interesting topic for a show. People invariably assume, because my first name is Conseula, that I'm Latina (and when I still had vestiges of my Louisiana accent, the combination often caused people t0 assume I was Caribbean). We certainly took these kinds of reactions into account when we named our children (Catherine and Frances), though our French Catholic heritage and Louisiana roots weighed much more heavily in our decisions.

But is being served by the train wreck currently on my tv? Is it a revelation that people are stupid and prejudiced? Or is it that people are willing to be that stupid in public?

Are black people that much of a mystery?

Does anyone with access to the mainstream media know any actual black people? I mean really, has Ralph Nader ever really had an actual conversation with a black person? And I mean a black person in real life, not one from a sociology textbook. How inane and clueless is this?

Asked if he thinks Obama is trying to "talk white," Nader said, "of course….The number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law," Nader said. "Haven't heard a thing."

Nader is running against Obama for president and perhaps the nature of political campaigns means you speak in hyperbole. Who knows? But this "talking white" nonsense and the implication that the concerns of any given black person can be boiled down to the plight of the poor is insulting because it means that even for a "progressive" like Nader, I'm not individual. I'm merely a ghetto statistic, or, even worse, a deluded black person talking white. It's exactly this kind of cluelessness, which abounds in the mainstream media, which explains how the pundits have been caught so off-guard by Obama's popularity among black people.

Roe v. Wade

Alison sent me a link to an article in which a doctor described the days before Roe V. Wade. Here's the most salient point from that article:

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

I've talked before in this space about my own abortion and what that has meant for my life (primarily it's meant that I got choose when to welcome into my life the two amazing daughters I have now). So it feels like beating a dead horse to say this again, but here goes: Every child should be a choice and every woman deserves to make that choice, or not. We can force them to make that choice out of fear and desperation, or we can let women make that choice with dignity. Feminism is not a one issue movement, certainly, but my right to self-determination (which is absolutely what choosing if and when to have children is) is certainly at the top of the list, which is something we should remember when we encourage people to vote for John McCain in protest of Hilary Clinton's primary loss.

The Dap Heard Around the World--More Reason to Love Michelle Obama

Over in the corner of the blogosphere where I hang out there's a lot of ballyhoo about the Obamas' dap (see the photo below) just before he gave his speech. There's a lot of discussion about whether this gesture is really black (um, yeah) and whether dap is the correct name for that gesture (it is, but for a great list of the various ways the press has tried to describe it, including "‘Hezbollah’ style fist-jabbing," look here).

You know what I loved? That Michelle initiated it. It's a small thing really, but what I saw was a woman who understands herself completely as an equal partner and knows that her husband feels the same way. It was a moment between the two of them, not for all of us. That dap is a gesture of friendship, of comraderie, of recognition. It says so much about that marriage. And what a great thing to be able to turn on the television and see--two real life black people so obviosuly in love with each other.

WOW!

Full disclosure: I have been the "first black" many things in my life and I'm often (really, almost always) the "only black" person in a room. How much has that mattered? It's hard to say--it mattered when it mattered and it didn't when it didn't. What mattered is that I rarely conceived of my blackness as something as limiting. My being the first black woman to do this or that never felt as barrier-breaking to me as I'm sure it did to women a generation older than me.

And then this primary election season came around and my blackness started to feel like a burden, not because I felt limited or constrained, but because it seemed that no matter what I did or Obama did or any black person did, we were still in a place where one seemingly angry black man (Wright, who, to be sure is justifiably angry and spot on in so many ways about this country) condemned us all. Where a black woman can't acknowledge that this country has given black people very few things to be proud of without a threat of lynching on national television. I fully, intellectually recognize that I've been jerked around and manipulated by a mainstream media eager for ratings. But, still, it was disheartening and upsetting. I am responsible for sheperding safely through the world two beautiful black girls and to think that one day I have to send them off to a world that will treat them no better than it did my mother or grandmother or great-grandmother is deeply deeply upsetting. That's probably an exaggeration, I know, but it really has felt that way these last few months.

But this morning, when my 7 year old sat eagerly in front of the news waiting to hear the results of last night's primaries and was so excited that Obama will be the nominee (something she predicted last June), I was teary-eyed. Because this is historic. This couldn't have happened before this moment. And my kids will grow up in a world forever shaped by this moment. And that has to count for something.

Afrogeekmom Bookshelf

First a brief note on the Sex and the City movie: am I missing some essential girl gene? Because I don't think I could care any less about this movie, despite their pandering efforts at trying to win me over by casting Jennifer Hudson. Moving on...

Oh the joys of summer! To be able to read books completely unrelated to what I teach or research. I feel positively decadent. I'm starting with two books featured on one NPR program or another (I can't really remember where I heard/read about them--I do know that both these books wound up on the electronic post-it on my computer desktop reserved for "books I will read one day when I have some time").


The first book is Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine. I confess upfront that I only got through half of this book (to May of the year without shopping). Maybe it gets better in the second half. The premise of the book is that the author, during one Christmas shopping season, becomes so dismayed by consumer culture and her own in participation in it, that she and her partner decide to embark on an experiment to buy only the necessities for 12 months. This is an admittedly self-indulgent, lefty experiment borne of privilege. Still, I was intrigued to read about how the author and her partner come to conclusions about what it is a necessity and what isn't. Well, it turns out that the daily New York Times is a necessity, and books for "research" are necessities, and six different kinds of vinegar are necessities (because, of course, you have to spend money on sustenance), and a $10 membership fee for a simplicity support group is a necessity. Along the way Levine trots out various academics talking about the psychology and economics and history of consumer behavior, but all this information seems to have little effect on her own thinking. Again, I only got to May. Maybe in December she has a revelation. In May her only revelation seems to be that buying only the necessities cuts you off from what you desire, which is so patently obvious and untrue at the same time that I just had to stop reading.


Luckily I also had on my nightstand The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. The book covers the tears between WWII and the Roe decision and looks at the experiences of women who were sent to maternity homes to have their children before relinquishing them for adoption. The whole time I was reading I was struck by two things. First, my own mother had me at 16, in 1973, and faced some of the same things the women in this book do. She felt deeply ashamed and that she'd betrayed her family. She wasn't allowed to go to her actual school until she was no longer pregnant. Like so many of the women in the book, she was an excellent student, from a nice family, and completely clueless about sex and pregnancy. She got pregnant the first time she had sex. Unlike the women in the book, though, she got to keep me. And no one ever made me feel as if my existence was a mistake, as I were unwanted. That makes such a difference.

Second, the book was a stark reminder of the importance of real sex education and access to reliable, affordable birth control, including abortion. This cannot be said enough, but the right to choose when and if to have children is the most important right women have and the one that should always be at the forefront of any feminist agenda. I've had a really bad attitude about feminism lately, and this book was nice reminder of why I adopted feminist politics in the first place.

A Deeper Black by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I officially want to be Ta-Nehisi Coates when I grow up. I've been reading his blog for about a month now (and can't wait to read his new memoir) and find him consistently thoughtful and spot on on contemporary culture and politics. Plus, his prose is a great pleasure to read. (He also outs himself as a gamer in this piece, and I'm always happy to find another afrogeek.)

In a recent post I attempted to articulate some thoughts about Obama' blackness. In a "A Deeper Black," Coates does a much better job of making the same point:

This is the blackness of Barack Obama. It is an identity that asserts itself without conscious thought. It has no need of marches and placards. It rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism but understands that esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege do not move the discussion further. It does not need to bluster, to scream, to hyperbolize. Obama's blackness is like any other secure marker of identity, subtle and irreducible to a list of demands.

If this election has taught us nothing else, it's taught us that we have very little language to talk about blackness in this country. The absurdity of the Wright controversy, the ceaseless sexism vs. racism debates, the descriptions of Obama and his campaign as post-racial all point to how little the mainstream media actually knows about the actual lives of real black people. Coates's piece is great because it not only grants black people complexity, as individuals and as a group, but also because he treats that complexity not as a great revelation, but as a matter of fact. He writes of his time at Howard, "From their unspoken variety, from the Alphas and Omegas, from the buoyant Afros and long dreads, from the night-blacks to those who were almost passing, I drew the great lesson that black was a country, a broad, beautiful America refracted through a smoky lens."

And maybe, just maybe, as black people waited and listened and deliberated as Obama made his appeal to them, they saw that he got that. A lot is made of Obama's avoidance of race or his unwillingness to play the race card (can we officially put that term out of its misery?) in this campaign, but maybe he gets what the pundits don't--to speak to black America about race alone is to speak to us about very little and to demonstrate that you don't know very much about us.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spoilers follow)

I wanted to like this movie. I really did. I love the other Indy movies--the old-fashioned premise, the artifacts full of mystical powers, the impossibly over-the-top yet still rooted in reality action sequences. I especially love that Indy's success isn't due to his fearlessness or physical strength (though he does manage to draw on those qualities when necessary), but rather his ability to solve riddles. Smart and sexy--there is a reason why I've long had a crush on Indiana Jones. (I also have a wildly inappropriate crush on 21-year old Shia LeBoeuf, so I was doubly excited to see this movie.)

Parts of "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" worked. It was great to see Marian Ravenwood again and she and Indy have just as much chemistry as ever. The movie had great and convincing fun with Harrison Ford's age. I also like that more screen time was given to Indy-as-college professor, though that may simply because I think college profs are cool. (By the way, where does Indy teach? The movie is set shortly after WWII, in the 1950s. There were women and black students on his campus.)

So much didn't work. The artifact in this movie, the crystal skull, which so obviously belongs to an alien (the movie pretends there is suspense around this fact, but there really isn't at all) is wildly out of place in the Indyverse. The last 30 minutes of the movie are like some weird parody of an Indiana Jones movie. The tone is cmpletely off and the very presence of aliens and their history with ancient people (they teach them how to farm, how to build pyramids, blah blah blah) undercuts much of the magic of the first three movies. I blame George Lucas. I have no particular reason to blame him, but I feel confident this is somehow all his fault.

Seeing the hat and the whip in action again was a thrill, but the movie was ultimately a disappointment.

Little House on the Prairie

Now that Frances (who played at her first coffeehouse at Hungry Monk last night and was absolutely adorable) is 7 and more tolerant of longer stories with fewer pictures at bedtime, Brian and I have started to read to her books we loved as children. Brian read to her The Book of Three (thereby passing along yet another geeky joy to our child--fantasy) and for the past couple of weeks I have been reading Little House on the Prairie.

I remember loving this book, remember happily reading through all the books in the series and watching the show after school on TBS. What I didn't remember was how horribly racist the book is. It seemed like every other page had some character saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" or bitching about the government moving settlers out of Indian territory. And Pa Ingalls's desire to live as far off the grid as possible (they end up on the prairie after Pa moves the family out of the little cabin in the big woods because the big woods was getting too crowded--they saw a wagon pass by everyday) verged on the pathological. It was all very disappointing and sad.

Frances loved the book, though, even if she did think the Ingalls were wrong to build their cabin on land that belonged to someone else.

Smart Negro Round #2

Ta'Nehesi Coates: On persistent claims that sexism is worse than racism
Do something that will prevent you from speaking on evils you've never had the privilege of dancing with. I beg of you--just stop it. You aren't qualified to speak on this. And the more you talk, the more we know.

Angry Black Bitch: on the "rift" between white feminists and feminists of color
Anyhoo, this rift ain’t new and it is layered with issues of class, race, orientation and identity that all play a role in our goals and tactics. The reason it may seem new is because we haven’t had a happening that demanded an unavoidable examination of our values and our goals in some time.

Mark Anthony Neal on the R. Kelly child pornography trial:
While we all can criticize the shamelessness of mainstream media and celebrity culture in the coverage of "events" like the R. Kelly trial, we should all feel a little shameful that the incident depicted in that much-downloaded videotape, did not incite our anger and vigilance--regardless of whether Robert Kelly was in the room.

Smart Negro Round-Up

I've given up blogging about politics, but I still read plenty of political posts. So let's start a new tradition here at Afrogeek Mom and Dad: Smart Negro Round-Up Thursdays. Here's what caught my eye this week:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: There is No Black Working Class
The surest sign of someone being an effete latte-sipping liberal is their acceptance of Hillary as an ambassador the white working class.

Bikari Kitwana: Steal This Election
Pay close attention as the pendulum slowly swings away from silhouettes of the angry Black man to the kinder, gentler, smiling face of Senator Clinton, praise songs focused on her experience, high fives to her toughness, and one story after another (from CNN to Fox) that unashamedly adopted Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy as their news angle of the day.

Mark Anthony Neal: Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on the "Franchise"
As I walked into the voting booth on Tuesday, I was clear that I was not simply voting for myself, but voting for my father--who passed two weeks after the February 5th round of primaries--and my two daughters, who both anxiously await their opportunities to fully participate in the franchise.

Angry Black Woman: On Feminism
And, quite honestly, I am tired of the burden being on us to fix this mess. I’m tired of having to decide if I want the label of “Feminist”, not because someone might think I hate men, but because someone might wonder why I would want to associate myself with people who think my voice and experiences are less important because I refuse to put my gender ahead of my race.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: Dear Governor Dean: Are You Ready to Lead?
Let's be clear. When black folks switch parties, we do it decisively. After nearly a century of unwavering commitment to the party of Lincoln, it was Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964, designed to appeal to entrenched American racism, which led to an increase in black Democratic Party identifiers from 59 percent to 86 percent in a single election. Despite Obama's call for unity in his North Carolina victory speech last night, black Americans will not stand behind a candidate who deploys a Goldwater strategy within our own party. Our opposition to the war will not allow us to vote for McCain, but we can choose to exit the coalition, withhold our votes, to protest a Clinton candidacy. This is not a threat. It is an observation based on historical evidence.

Miley Cyrus--Girl Gone Wild?

I have seen the Miley Cyrus photo and heard it described, alternately, as soft core porn and as a publicity stunt. Either this 15 year old girl has been taken advantage of by all the adults around her, or she has taken her first step toward becoming the next tabloid train wreck.

I'm conflicted about this. My own 7 year old, like 7 year olds around the globe, is obsessed with Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana. My knee jerk reaction was to be appalled that her parents allowed the picture to be taken, that Annie Leibovitz would even think to take such a picture, and to lament the hypersexualization of young girls in our culture. Yet...

I've also just returned from a conference where I (along with Alison) delivered a paper that argued, in part, that women's sexuality is marginalized/ignored/pathologized by mainstream society. We are deeply uncomfortable with female sexual desire and pleasure. Yet, paradoxically, it is exactly sexual pleasure and desire, or at least the performance of it, that we offer young girls/women as the means by which they assert their autonomy. I'm reminded of Jessica Simpson talking about how empowering it was to wear Daisy Duke's shorts in the Dukes of Hazard movie; of Anne Hathaway wanting to take the breast-exposing role in Brokeback Mountain in an effort to shed her Disney princess image; of Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart as she attempted to move out from under Bill Cosby's shadow; of Halle Berry's Oscar for Monster's Ball. One can easily imagine that Miley Cyrus, in the thick of her hormonal adolescence, perhaps feeling the claustrophobia of being a star in the Disney machine, fearing losing herself in the squeaky clean image of Hannah Montana, jumped at the chance to work with Annie Leibovitz and create the kind of sexually provocative images Leibovitz is known for.

Who knows? I do feel sorry for her, though. Not only will the outcry about this be huge (already prompting Cyrus to deliver an Obama-style repudiation of Leibovitz), but I also feel like we've ruined whatever kind of joy or power or solace she may have found in the picture, or by extension, her burgeoning sexual self.

Of Natural Hair and Role Models

I've talked in this space before about my fraught relationship with my hair. After getting my hair relaxed in October of last year, I decided to go natural. Being too chicken to cut all my hair off (the easiest way to go natural after having relaxed hair), I decided to let my relaxer grow out and try various hybrid hairstyles while decided exactly what to do with my hair. Alas, my inherent hair laziness kicked in and three weeks ago I was back at the salon getting my hair chemically treated. I thought a lot about the decision and thought I felt good about it (reading the comments on a post about natural hair at Stuff Educated Black People Like got me really thinking about the fetishization of natural hair in certain circles) until I went to work the next day.

Several students on separate occasions came to me to ask about my hair. Did I get a relaxer? Did I get my hair pressed? Was all that all my real hair? Not only was I caught off guard by those questions (who knew people were paying that much attention to my hair?), but I was also surprised at their sense of betrayal. These students, all young black women, were clearly very disappointed in me. I'd let them down.

I hate the very idea of making choices about my personal appearance based on other people's expectations, but at the same time I understand that my public persona is very important. Being a black professional in a place like Charleston, SC matters in very real, material ways. My very presence, my actual physical body as well as the idea of me, intervenes into all kinds of weird racial histories and tensions here, so it's important that I take seriously what that presence says. I get that. Yet...there also needs to be room for me to be the me that I'm going to be. And maybe that me has chemically straightened hair. I know that sounds defensive and maybe it is just my justification for participating in my own oppression. Who knows?

I haven't made up my mind about how I feel about all of this.

Barack Obama and Rev. Wright: Greta Van Susteren is Shocked and Offended

Are you fucking kidding me?

Right around the time the mainstream news started wetting themselves with excitement about Hilary Clinton's primary victories in Texas and Ohio (despite the fact that it changed nothing, despite the fact that Obama continues to maintain a near insurmountable lead in delegates, despite the fact that Americans of all stripes, regardless of how you break them down demographically clearly prefer Obama to Clinton) and Clinton egged them on by condescendingly graciously extending the office of the vice presidency to Obama, I went on a news black out. There are people out there who can live and breathe political news 24/7 and maintain enough emotional distance to write about it with clarity and wit and intelligence. I can't. So I try not to.

But tonight I'm flipping through the channels and all the talk is about Obama and the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. Lou Dobbs is taking a break from talking about immigration to predict the demise of Obama's campaign. Greta Van Susteren is talking to some poor, deluded, black man, forcing him to agree with her when she says, "We're as close as brother and sister" and feigns shock at the "offensive" statements of Rev. Wright. And what offensive statements you ask?

Web sites and television news shows recalled Wright's praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and played a greatest-hits compilation of Wright's most incendiary comments: that Sept. 11, 2001, meant "America's chickens are coming home to roost." That former president Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky." That "racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run."

Wright's statements, along with Michelle Obama's assertion that she is proud of her country for the first time, are being taken as signs that Barack Obama can't in fact bring us together, that he won't be the racially transcendent candidate that so many want him to be.

But let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Nobody gives a fuck that George W. Bush is not a racially transcendent candidate and never pretended to be. His administration is attentive and responsible to white male monied interests, and barely apologizes for that. When we say "racially transcendent" we mean "a black man that white people can like." That so many black people seem to like Obama (he got 91% of the black vote in Mississippi, as Pat Buchanan kept insisting, just before he told a black woman to shut up), that he goes to a decidedly black church, that his wife seems to be exactly the kind of black woman that makes white people nervous, that he is running his campaign with funds drawn from black wealth and the hard-earned dimes of working class black folk--all this makes white people nervous. Obama is fine as long as white people can chant "Yes We Can" at rallies and forward the will.i.am video to everybody in their address book. But point out America's racist past and present, suggest that the same American flag that you want me to get teary eyed over is the exact same one that my ancestors were slaves under, the same one that my grandparents were denied the right to vote under, the same one under which my mother attended segregated schools, the same one under which I didn't go to integrated schools until 1982, and watch all the warm, fuzzy, feeling fade away. Suddenly we are the racists and Greta Van Susteren is deeply hurt (you see, she's never heard a black person talk this way).

People believe hanging nooses from trees and professors' doors is funny. People see nothing wrong with displaying the confederate flag. John fucking Calhoun stands atop a giant fucking pedestal less than a mile from my office. Robert Downey, Jr. will perform in blackface in an upcoming movie. This is the country I live in. Maybe it's not the country Greta Van Susteren lives in. Maybe she's never been asked to be proud of a country that is more than happy to give her syphilis and then lie about it, or sterilize her without her consent, or leave her stranded for days as a city floods around her. I'm asked to be proud of that country every goddamned day. You'll have to forgive me if there are days that I can't quite muster the energy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Barack Obama is not a special black man, a superhuman racially transcendent black man. He is, simply, a black man, like lots of black men trying to negotiate a black identity and an American one, two warring souls in one dark body, as Dubois said. Any black man running for president of the United States clearly has a deeply felt patriotism. Otherwise, why subject yourself to this? At the same time, any black man running for president is still a black man and always feels his two-ness (to borrow another phrase from Dubois), always recognizing how all the contradictions of this country are embodied in him. As Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes,

Let's be clear. American democracy has always coexisted with vicious,state-sponsored racism. The nation's first presidents worked to establish aninnovative, flexible, radical democratic republic while simultaneouslycodifying enslaved blacks as a fraction human and relegating them tointergenerational chattel bondage.

After emancipation, as blacks helped make America the greatest industrialand military power on earth, the country stripped blacks of the right tovote, segregated public accommodations, provided inferior education to blackchildren, and allowed and promoted the terrorist rule of lynch-mob violence. This week Barack Obama was pressured to denounce Jeremiah Wright. But in the hundred years following the end of the Civil War more than five thousand African Americans were lynched and not a single president denounced the atrocities. Because of this history, black patriotism is complicated.

Black patriots love our country, even though it has often hated us. We love our country, even while we hold it accountable for its faults.

I *Heart* Indiana Jones

This is the picture that greeted me when I opened my mailbox and pulled out my favorite entertainment magazine. I'm told that I actually *squeaked* when I saw this photo of Harrison Ford at the height of his Indiana Jones glory. (I'm not convicned that I actually squeaked. Clearly Brian made that detail up.) What is it about Harrison Ford, as Han Solo and Indiana Jones and John Book? What doI find so irresistible? Certainly the kind of macho masculinity he embodies in Witness and Star Wars and the Indy movies are all iterations of masculinity that I object to and ultimately find damaging to men in general. But damn, if he isn't sexy as hell in this picture.

I'll be writing about the new Indy movie for the City Paper when it opens in May and will hopefully have something smarter to say than "Oh my god! Harrison Ford's cute. And so is Shia LeBeouf (but I feel wrong even thinking that)." But right now all I can manage is "squeak!"

Geeky Things I Love on Valentine's Day

I've had a really long and trying day and we haven't celebrated anything geeky lately here on Afrogeek Mom and Dad. So on this Valentine's Day, I offer geeky things that always make me feel better:



First, Neil Degrasse Tyson. I often think that if I had it to do all over again, I'd like to be an astrophysicist, but as I can barely tell time on an analog clock, much less do calculus, that dream seems unlikely to come true. I still think he's awesome.


Second, Fables. It's been ages since I've found a comic series I loved this much from the very first page. The description--characters from fairy tales, legends, and mythologies exiled from their Homelands in our world, fighting the Adversary--doesn't do this series justice. It's smart, funny, sexy, incredibly witty, well-written and plotted, everything you could want in a comic.



And third, Torchwood. I never got into Dr. Who and I really need another tv addiction like a hole in the head, but the sheer unapologetic geeky joy that permeates this alien-a-week series makes me incredibly happy. And the fact that Captain Jack Harkness is easy on the eyes *and* as likely snog a man as a woman makes it that much better.

Some Day I Will Write a Book About Blackness

Gary Kamiya, in a Salon article, writes about being biracial and how his own choice to completely eschew a racial identity is different than Obama's choice to embrace a black identity. Kamiya's article is really good at showing how he comes to not question Obama's choice to identify as black, despite being biracial, but really, perhaps, for the first time, recognizing what it means for someone who is biracial to make that choice and how that choice, paradoxically,brings Obama to a place where race is not the chief definer of his identity. Kamiya writes:

"The essence of Obama's politics, his call for reconciliation and unity, is thus deeply grounded in the long and painful creation of his own double identity. It is, almost literally, sealed in blood -- the mixed blood, black and white, that flows through his veins. With Obama, the movement is always toward a double affirmative. Not neither black nor white, which is the way I and many mixed-race people identify ourselves, but both black and something larger."

The other day I was talking to a colleague, a black Latin American woman, and we got to talking about the election (the place where all conversations seem to end these days). And we talked about how we recognized ourselves in Barack Obama, whether or not we wound up voting for him. We recognized in him the experience of being the only black kid in the room, being the first black person to hold this or that postion, accomplish this or that thing, being the black person who makes other people (read: white people) feel good about the possibilities of integration, the black person who stands in as the evidence of someone else's colorblindness. And we recognized in Obama the work that has gone in to fashioning a black identity that can navigate all of that. Because, while blackness is not always a choice for some of us (my colleague and I, because of what we look like, can hardly choose to be anything else within the American racial schema), how we understand and live our blackness requires the same kind of choice Kamiya describes Obama making. This notion, that is so prevalent currently, that blackness is monolithic, that black people identify primarily as black, that blackness is the chief definer of our experience, is so patently untrue as to be laughable to most black people. Every single black person has to figure out what it means to be black, has to figure what relationship they have to the "black community" [side note: in my book, perhaps I will seek out this "black community"--where is it located? do you need a pass to get in?], has to figure where an individual self does and does not share mental and emotional space with a black self. Of course Obama comes to a place where he is "both black and something larger." That's the place where most black people, not just "mixed race" blacks, live and that people continue to fail to recognize that is a testament to how much work around race still needs to be done in this country.

This Is How a Party Splits

What we have at this moment in the 21st century is a generation of black people born into a post-Civil Rights America, provided opportunities unimaginable to their parents, and rewarded with a world that, for many of us, is far more integrated than many could have hoped for. We have learned that a world defined completely by race (or gender or sexuality or religion) is an incredibly small world and have demanded, and continue to demand, that all aspects of our identities and lives be taken seriously. We can't be counted on to play the American race game as it's always been played. We can't be counted on to choose blackness over our gender or sexuality or class or religion.

But that doesn't mean blackness doesn't matter. That race doesn't still have a profound effect on our day to day to existence. That you can call me a nigger and get away with it.

And it doesn't mean that I have to pretend to be colorblind for your convenience.

Mickey Kaus over at Slate offered this advice to Obama, a strategy he can use to get out of the political ghetto he now finds himself in (read: how he can keep his white supporters despite his growing support among black voters):

The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah--after Saturday--to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn't that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He'd renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment--they'd flood the cable shows--would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot--she'd be the one defending mend-it-don't-end-it civil rights orthodoxy.

So the only way Obama can win, the only way white voters will support him, is if he goes out of his way to show that he's willing to be unpopular with black people? Because black people liking you too much makes you suspect?

rikyrah at jackandjillpolitics in a post about "progressive" bloggers and the South Carolina primary had this to say:

So, let me get this straight - Hillary Clinton wins White women in New Hampshire, and it's this great victory, but if Barack Obama wins South Carolina, after ten months of campaigning, because of sizeable Black support, it doesn't REALLY count? What is this - are we back to being Three-Fifths once again? The Black vote doesn't count as much as the White vote? I'm going to say this as obviously as I can:

YOU DO NOT WANT TO GO DOWN THIS ROAD.

You simply don't. There is this underlying condescension that has been creeping into the "Progressive" blogs that, ' oh, well , THEY - meaning Blacks- have nowhere else to go. So, the Clintons and their proxies, who are actually race-baiting, but we'll say that they aren't, and tell those Blacks who are informing us as to what they see that it's in their IMAGINATION - well, they'll shut up, go SIT IN THEIR PLACE and turn up in November like they're SUPPOSED TO.' That's not a bet you want to take.

James Brown said it:
We'd rather die on our feet
Than be livin' on our knees

I am part of the Hip-Hop generation, and those of us who are Post Civil-Rights have learned our lessons well. We learned to hear the Dogwhistle of Racial Politics; our parents taught us that for SURVIVAL, but what they afforded us that they didn't have, was the option of getting off of our knees.

I hope this primary season goes down in American political and racial history as the season black people finally gets up off our knees.

Hilary vs. Barack: What's a Black Woman To Do?

Remember when this blog was about comic books and kids and random musings on life?

It's interesting being a black woman living in South Carolina these days. All eyes are on us, as if the press and politicians have just realized that we do in fact vote, and, more importantly, that we can't be counted on to vote with our black brothers or white sisters.

Of course this is all being played out most dramatically in the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Neither the Iowa caucuses nor the New Hampshire primary contained a significant number of black voters, and each candidate's win is being contributed to women voters choosing one over the other. With black women making up the majority of registered black voters in South Carolina, we are suddenly historically important.

Now you would think that would translate into at least a little respect for the political power we wield (if only at this moment), but instead we're being told that we're naïve, politically regressive, or easily swayed by a good-looking face. We're being told that the civil rights establishment "doesn't know" Obama and that fact doesn't matter anyway because it was actually LBJ that made civil rights reform happen. The implication is clear--vote for Clinton (and not this shucking and jiving outsider) or forever be branded as the backward thinking cabal that brought down the Democratic party.

Alison over at Baxter Sez says she feels as if she's being asked to choose a team in this election. I feel the same way, only I feel as if I'm only being given one choice--Hilary Clinton. No one, besides the man himself, is asking me to vote for Obama. Voting for Clinton will somehow prove my rightness as a Democrat and a woman and a feminist, whereas voting for Obama, apparently, will prove only that I'm hanging on too tightly to the irrelevant category of race.

Like Alison, the last two weeks have been difficult for me because I feel torn. Like Mark Anthony Neal, I absolutely understand the importance of being black and claiming feminism as my own. It's a particularly public and political statement that demands feminism take the concerns of women of color seriously and a reminder to black people that we have our own gender work to do. But these days I'm agreeing with Aaminah Hernandez and remembering why we need a black feminist womanist movement and why it will be a while before I can be anything other than a reluctant feminist.

If Steinem's, and others', argument about voting for Hilary had been about feminism, about how a Clinton presidency would be good for the progressive feminist politics we presumably all share, that would be one thing. That's an argument I'd be willing to entertain. But of course this isn't what's happening. I'm being asked to vote for Hilary Clinton because she has a vagina and because she's white and if you doubt the "white makes right" tone of the post-Iowa push for Clinton, check out the race-baiting that her campaign has resorted to in order to drum up votes.

Is Obama the right person to be the next president of the United States? Maybe. Maybe not. But if Hilary's going to get my vote, she's going to have to do a lot more than show up with vagina and talk with a "black" accent. And I suspect a lot of other black women in South Carolina feel the same way.