If you’re only going to read one long-form piece of political journalism before summer ends, allow me to suggest you make it Ta-Nihisi Coates’ “Fear Of A Black President”, the cover story in September’s issue of The Atlantic.
Taking the measure of America’s first black president and presidency, evaluating Barack Obama and our reaction to him, Coates ranges across politics, comedy, biography, music, history, media studies, sociology, sports and popular culture in a way I’d call sprawling…if it weren’t for the fact that nothing Coates writes is “sprawling”.
Some folks may remember Tina Turner saying “we never ever do nothing nice…and easy“. Well, Ta-Nihisi Coates never writes anything “sprawling”. It’s always tight, gripping, resonant.
After recounting how Richard Pryor, Cedric the Entertainer and Dave Chappelle wrought comedic gold out of the bitter truth that white racism rendered a black presidency impossible, Coates writes:
“Thus, in hard jest, the paradoxes and problems of a theoretical black presidency were given voice. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America’s democratic double-talk, that was too ghetto and raw for the refinement of the Oval Office. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that “they” would never accept us. And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5-foot point guards might invoke the dunk–as evidence of some great cosmic injustice, weighty in its import, out of reach.
As does—to the surprise even of many who voted for him in 2008—President Barack Obama. And not just as a president who happens to be a black man. A black man who chose to root himself in the South Side of Chicago, to marry a black woman, to identify as African-American on his census returns. A black man who plays pickup basketball, who sings Al Green and Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick, who brushes “Dirt Off (His) Shoulders“.
And yet.
Also a black man who, because of the enduring power of what Coates identifies as “not some new racism–it’s the dying embers of the same old racism”, has spoken less about race than any Democratic president in the past 50 years.
On the eve of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, before the post-Labor Day campaign begins in earnest, there’s no better article for taking the measure of our politics and our society—how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
Of course…Tina Turner was wrong. The whole history of jazz is sufficient proof of that. From Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown and any number of other Duke Ellington musicians through Ellington himself and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn and on into Count Basie and Lester Young w/the Basie Band, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis and beyond, “Nice and easy does it every time.”
Not “every time,” exactly…the power of the black American culture that produced so much great art and so many heroic men and women lay precisely in its ability to run hot and/or cool. On every level. Simultaneously, sometimes. People do not survive 400 years of vicious slavery and equally vicious racism without learning when to lay back and when to push forward. Bet on it.
The most telling book on the black experience in pre-civil rights, segregated America that I have ever read is titled “Black Like Me”, and I would suggest that anybody who is interested in what life was really like for black people in segregation times…anybody of any race…should read it. It was written by a southern white man…Texas southern…named John Howard Griffin. In 1959 he took large doses of a drug named Methoxsalen, spent many hours under ultraviolet light and essentially transformed himself into a black man. He then spent six weeks on Greyhound buses and hitchiking through the south. The many kindnesses and the overall understanding, love and gentleness offered him by other black people during this time were perhaps the biggest surprise of this experience to him. This is an astounding book. Read it if you have not done so already.
And…as Ron Paul so eloquently illustrated (see below)…just exactly who the fuck is this “we” that Tina Turner references? I mean…really. She had a rough life and she sang and danced “hot,” but did she miss the other half of this culture?
Sounds like she did.
So it goes.
She oughta go read some Langston Hughes.
From his poem “Dream Variations”:
Like dat.
AG
P.S. The Ron Paul statement on “race” and racism. Spoken in the House of Representatives, April 16, 2007.
Hmmmmmm…
Think on it.
Please.
Forget what you have been told about Ron paul by a mainstream media that was doing its job of protecting the American scam and think on what he said!!!
Please.
P.P.S. I have had my own share of “surprises” regarding the black culture. As a white, middle class, northern teenager in the late ’50s/early ’60s who had experienced almost no direct personal contact with black people, when I became interested in being a jazz musician the “nice ‘n easiness” of so many black musicians towards me…their total generosity of spirit as they shared their knowledge once they realized that I really meant to learn how to play…was a total contradiction of almost everything that the mainstream culture had tried to teach me about the black population. It still brings tears to my eyes to remember.
Like dat, too.