A White House official, speaking on background, stressed that the
meeting in no way signals a retreat from Obama's commitment to push
ahead with comprehensive health care reform. He's interested in hearing
out Republican ideas, the official said, but when the discussion is
done he wants to see a bill move forward--and pass.
Why? Is he seriously interested in changing the bill to include more Republican ideas. Seriously? If not then what is he doing? Trying to show the American people how broad-minded he is? I like how Obama has come out over the past week. But I can't escape the feeling that there is no real plan. One day Rahm is telling us that health care is fifth on the list of priorities, the next day Obama is telling us that it's still at the top--or some such.
I'm having a really hard time seeing how this is going to happen. They don't have the votes. And by Obama's lights, it doesn't seem to much that can be done to create them. If Democrats lose this, with the kind of majority they command right now, with a Democratic president, why should any voter trust them to do any of the heavy lifting that's needed in this country?
This FT piece arguing that Obama's Chicago circle is killing him is making the rounds on the progressive blogs. John says he hasn't read it, but is skeptical. He probably should be:
But those around him have a more specific diagnosis - and one that
is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for
campaigning rather than governing, they say.
In dozens of
interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington - most of
them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval
Office - each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very
tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people - Rahm
Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie
Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications
chief.
My issues with anonymous sourcing aside, I came away thinking that there probably was a critique to be made, just not a geographical one. Anyway, check it out yourself. I'd love for a journalist to really report out this charge that Rahm Emanuel is ruining everything. This piece kinda tries it, but it isn't convincing.
People are talking about the Jane Mayer piece. I haven't read it, but there aren't many journalists whom I respect more. I'll report back after I've had a chance to read.
Been meaning to post this fantastic piece from the Washington Monthly on how Texas' school text-book committees are basically plotting to make the nation's kids as dumb as possible. Mariah Blake reports:
On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up
clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the
aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the
West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the
Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America
against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the "original war
against Islamic Terrorism." What's more, the group aims to give history
a pro-Republican slant--the most obvious example being their push to
swap the term "democratic" for "republican" when describing our system
of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black
churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that
African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans
and that, given the "atrocious" treatment blacks have gotten at the
hands of Democrats, "it might be much more appropriate that ... demands
for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the
federal government." He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks,
partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil
rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were
friendlier with Republicans.
Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to
purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as
César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back
down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more
subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr.
deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn't be given
credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, "Only
majorities can expand political rights in America's constitutional
society." Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by
whites--in his view, mostly white Republican men.
Because Texas buys so many textbooks, the effect of this sort of thing is felt nationally. Check out the piece. Try to avoid being depressed.
Cop in the hood digs up this great nugget from 1911:
The demoralizing character of some of the moving picture shows, says the New Jersey Law Journal,
continues to be exemplified by proceedings from time to time in our
local and county criminal courts. One of the latest instances was a
case which came before Judge Case, of the Somerset County courts, where
a bright little fellow of nine years of age was arraigned before the
judge for truancy and for incorrigibility. The prosecutor informed the
court that the root of the boy's misconduct was the moving picture
show, and the counsel for the boy stated that the offender had been a
good child at home and obedient until he developed the passion for
attending moving picture shows.
The account of the case then goes on to
say: "When the boy was commanded to stand up before Judge Case he burst
into tears. Judge Case called him to his seat behind the bar and talked
to him kindly, after which he announced that he would place him in
charge of Probation Officer Osbourn for three years. In closing his
remarks Judge Case said that the moving picture shows were undoubtedly
the most demoralizing force in the country to-day. The pictures had a
great fascination for even adults, and the graphic portrayals of
holdups, robberies, and of immoral scenes and characters, made a
lasting impression on the minds of children that were demoralizing in
the extreme. Judge Case said that the court would expect the law
relating to moving picture shows to be strictly obeyed in the county."
Heh. "Moving Picture Show." One of the great thrills of reading the old slave oral histories, is the sense among the slave that the "talking pictures" were ruining black youth. With due respect to the slaves, these would be the youth that launched the civil rights movement.
An almost vice-president, likely presidential candidate, in the friendliest of friendly interviews--writes the answers on her hand. This is, among other things, an attack ad waiting to happen. But more than that it really is what happens when you turn conservatism into nothing more than the white populist id.
Maybe it always was that. I don't know. What you have here is a party being eaten alive by the hate that they stoked for decades, dumbasses who think the essence of "Real America" is stupidity and ignorance, who'd sooner have a president who packs a cheat-sheet to a tea party, than a Indonesian/socialist/nigger/Muslim. Soon we'll know if they're right.
The popular environmental movement (not talking about deep ecology
here) has still taken the individualist culture for granted. The acts
we tend to look to in order to be green are individual acts --
recylcing, driving less, using a cloth bag -- whatever. But any real
change can't be done through individual acts alone.
This came up for me shortly after reading an article suggesting that
not having kids was one of the best environmental decisions you could
make. My wife and I, at the time, had a son who had just passed away.
The thought (to me) that him dying was in some way a plus for the
environment was unthinkable. And I recognized that this was all driven
by the assumption that the only way we could improve our environment
was through individual acts.
I hope this isn't seen as off topic, because to me it's the same
impulse driving this: in our culture, there really isn't a choice
between guilt and innocence on our relationship with the natural world.
As much as stripping away the bad in ourselves is an important act, I
believe that it is even more important to help in building a culture of
justice.
Condolences to Rob.
This got me thinking. Among those who want kids, is there an environmentalist case for adoption? Obviously, I don't mean in terms of mandates or even over-suggestion, but just in terms of the logic of the thing.
Granted this is a really extreme example of the limits of "Is this racist?", but it pissed me off, and then made me really sad. I'm sure ?uestlove was half-joking. The accompanying brouhaha isn't very funny. I was debating with Kenyatta about this last night. For me, as an African-American, the key question isn't, "Do I believe some hypothetical black person might take this the wrong way?" but, "Do I seriously believe NBC was attempting to demean me?"
Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask about this. That menu sounds delicious to me. I get the point that the food is actually Southern and not "black." But I also think two things: 1.) There are assholes in the world who delight in being offensive. 2.) The presence of said assholes should not be license to presume offense, until otherwise disproven.
In a world where we presume offense, where we exclaim, "You're trying to insult me," as opposed to asking, "Do I have all the contextual facts?" this sort of thing is going to keep happening. And we will continue to be confronted with the absurdity of corporations apologizing to no one in particular, for the crime of listening to their black employees.
So allow me my moment of being shocked--shocked!--that Richard Shelby is seeking to elevate obstructionism to the level of performance art:
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary "blanket hold" on
at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate,
according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no
nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a
60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold...
According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama's nominees hostage
until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer
dollars to his home state get back on track. The two programs Shelby
wants to move forward or else:
- A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily:
"Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has
threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes
changes to a draft request for proposals." Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.
- An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily:
"[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won't build" the
center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is
due to be based "at the Army's Redstone Arsenal."
You need 60 votes to break the hold. But you knew that already, right?
This is a very long post which I started while thinking about the debate around Henrietta Locks on this site. If you have other things to do, go do them. I'll be a little hurt. But I think, with some work, I'll get over it.
My first sense that losing weight would be hard came long before I actually began the process. It was the Spring of 2001, shortly after Samori was born. We were living in Delaware, but dreaming of New York. Kenyatta worked nights at the local paper. I had no job, save pounding out articles for cheap wages that nobody read. No matter. I was proud and gleeful whenever I saw it in print. But too I'd packed on some pounds--some during my college, some while while watching Kenyatta navigate a life-threatening pregnancy. "I'll knock it out at the gym," I thought, "Three or four months and the God will be his old high-school self."
I am now, almost a decade later, just entering my second month. In the intervening years, the God has been a lot of things, the old high school is not among them.
Anyway, that first hint came one afternoon when we decided to drive down to Baltimore and see the family. Usually on those drives we'd grab something on the road to keep from having to make breakfast that morning. But it was only then, resolving to get this done, that I really took note of the precise nature of our options, and the fact that if I were serious, I'd have to avoid all of them. I remember thinking about people (not like me) who worked long hours and spent more long hours in the car for a commute. I remember thinking about how the fast food options along the road fit into that system, how they were part of a broader thing, a broader method of production and consumption.
When you want to lose weight, smart people tell you that it isn't simply a matter of going to the gym more or eating low-fat cookies, it's a lifestyle change. We've heard that said so much that it's become a cliche. But it's essentially true. We change who we hang out with, where we spend our evenings, the time of our commute. A simple job switch can net 20 pounds. The overweight who've thought about their condition (those who consider it a condition) understand the folly of simply saying "I won't eat this and I'll work out more." It's so much bigger and so much more systemic.
And for me, in month two, it gets deeper everyday. Finding my way out has meant seriously grappling with what I eat and how I eat in ways beyond a calorie count. The aesthetics of slimness have never been enough for me. It'd be nice to look like the rock, but this is really about tossing the football to your grandkids, and then not bringing them into a unsustainable system of consumption that's warping the planet.
To call this an understanding misses the point--it's always about the good questions, instead of the certain answers. I probably shouldn't eat much beef, and when I eat it I should consult this website so that I know how it was killed, right? I should be suspicious of eggs, and look for cage-free, but sometimes cage-free is a con to lure in neophytes like me, right? I know that egg whites are good for me, but isn't there something wrong about dumping half the egg, right? And I love pineapples, but God knows what manner of abomination flew those beauties up from the tropics, right?
I don't understand half as much about this sort of thing as most people writing on the web. But I do understand the tremendous difficulty of getting conscious, as the brothers say, and thus trying to fulfill all my daily tax-paying responsibilities, while extricating the cog of myself from the wicked machine.
But more than that, I understand enough to be wary of inveighing against people who eat at McDonalds--or even McDonald's itself--of harshly interrogating the morality of flesh-eaters (I am, of course, among them.) It's not that any of this is wrong per se, so much as it's limited. When you're constantly naming people for their sins of consumption, it's very hard to get them to act against a system of consumption. More than that, it often misses the point of how hard it is to pull oneself out of the Matrix, and thus underestimates the Matrix, in that it assumes we can win by yelling.
Likewise, I think in my best writing here, in the writing that really matters, I've worked to steer us away from the reductive parlor game of "Is this/he/she racist?" It's useful to a point, but ultimately self-serving. It underestimates our demons and it underestimates how an entire system warped nearly every institution in this country, and continues to warp it to this day. What I'd rather we us understand is some sense of the big system, some sense of American white supremacy as mechanized racism.
Has Obama been a little feistier over the past week? Maybe it's because health care dominated the agenda, and he decided to take a backseat role. Ezra noted yesterday that when Obama highlighted that Village Voice headline "Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate," the Democrats laughed politely, but Obama didn't.
I reserve the right to be a nigger. --Aaron McGruder
One thing that that repeatedly rankles me when Judis makes his "white working class" critique of Obama, is that he never engages the populist prejudice he presumably wants Obama to overcome. I'm not sure that he even accurately names the prejudice--I don't like his broad sweeping terms.
But accepting them for the sake of argument, you get this undercurrent that it's somehow understandable that presumably non-racist white working class people would vote against someone because their parents, like, valued education and shit....
If we were talking about a group of black voters who refused to vote for someone because they aspired to be a lawyer or politician, we would be knee-deep in "black pathology" diatribes and Bill Cosby call-outs. Mo-fos would think it was the second Maafa. T
I get that Obama is a politician, and thus it's his job to make people vote for him. But I don't understand why anti-intellectualism among black people is pathological, and among white people is taken as evidence of working class roots.
I thought were done with this after the election. Evidently not. Here's John Judis:
Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among
white working class voters. That's not because they are white. He would
have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if
they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has
trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming
from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different
class, if you like. And that's because he does.
Judis continues:
Obama's parents were professionals--his mother was an anthropology PhD
and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they
made was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a
bank vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to
prestigious colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out
professionals and managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making
money, but with performing a public service--yet that doesn't
distinguish him from other professionals or other Columbia graduates.
It does distinguish him from a working- or middle-class American for
whom being a civil rights lawyer or professor or politician is at best
a passing fantasy...
Yes, there have been some gifted politicians of an upper class or
professional background who have been able to do so. Some, like Bill
Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or Ronald Reagan, could draw upon their
working class childhoods; others, like Franklin Roosevelt or Edward
Kennedy, could evince a kind of upper-class paternalism. This made them
great politicians. It didn't necessarily make them great men or great
Americans. Barack Obama is, by any fair measure, a great American, and
he could turn out to be a great president. But he is not yet a great
politician. He has not been able to transcend the political limits of
his own social background. And that has been one of his problems as he
attempts to extricate America from the mess he inherited.
I don't really understand this. By Judis' own definition--professional parents, private schools, prestigious college, aspiration to be a politician--George W. Bush was a yuppie. I haven't ran the numbers, maybe Bush's yuppie background kept him from relating to the white working class also.
Judis then charges that Obama, as a yuppie, "has not been able to transcend the political limits of his social background." I call this moving the goal-posts. I think it's fair to say that in 2008, Judis thought those "limits" included winning the presidency, to say nothing of winning Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio.
I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way, but I think one of two things--and maybe both things--have to be true after the election. Obama, a black man among other things, actually did transcend his "social background" by winning in 2008. Or we need to stop ascribing near totemic power to the "white working class."
I often wonder if detailed shots of STDs and description of the
treatment along with free condoms and instructions on how to use them
would be more effective than 90% of sex ed programs.
I don't know. In terms of condom use, I think we can only control so much. That said, I think--speaking from personal experience--credibility is key. You may scare a few kids, but I think many more will see that you're intentionally trying to scare them, and thus doubt your motives. They may not say it that way, but I think that's the thought process.
Again, speaking for myself the mere word gonorrhea was scary to me. Having its effects described to me in plain English--and its method of detection, eff the swab test--was enough. U didn't need pictures, I was good.
Beyond that, I think we need to remember how often we, as adults, are ourselves sexually irresponsible. In this arena, the dumbest shit I did happened after I'd turned 18. Context is everything.
It's weird reading the back and forth sparked by old colleague Ross's column on sex education and abstinence. Leaving aside what is effective and what isn't, I date back to my time as a high schooler. It's very difficult for me to imagine what an adult could have told me that would have made me not want to have sex. People tried, but it was like someone saying to me, "You really should only eat once a day and use the bathroom once a week."
Condoms were a bit different. Two of my best friends' fathers--among others I knew--died of AIDS, and by my senior year every one of my classes had a girl who either was pregnant, or already had a kid. Plus I'd been told how they treated gonorrhea, and didn't want any part. Eff the dumb shit, I was gonna strap up. We plan to have condoms available in our home, once the boy starts smelling himself. If I had a daughter, we'd have done the same and had a conversation about birth control. That's me, I make no prescriptions for your kids and your home.
Beyond that, when I think about the girls who got pregnant back in high school, and the dudes that got them pregnant, in the main, I don't think about them needing tools for impulse control, so much as I think about them not understanding the beautiful bigness of the world, and how teen pregnancy shrinks that world. To say that they had low expectations for themselves doesn't get at it, more like, they didn't really know what was possible.
A few years back I did a talk at a college in the mountains, and I remember thinking, "Wow, I didn't know you could go to college in the mountains." It's a small thing, and I don't really know how class and wealth play into this. I do know, that when compared to people of my social class, I was much more exposed to the broader world. I think I might have had a better sense of what there was to lose, because I had a better sense of what could be gained.
I don't know about tools to encourage safe sex. Again, I suspect we're talking about something much broader.
I keep meaning to link to this incredible interview with Patti Smith which ran on Fresh Air a few weeks ago. When I left my parents home, I was convinced that I could somehow know, and appreciate, everything important about the world. But the older I get, the more it becomes obvious that I may never be able to explain the importance of Satre. Ditto for Patti Smith. I get that she's important. I don't think I'll ever be to seriously appreciate why. Still, even for a novice like the kid, she had a raw, honesty that came through in this interview.
I know there's a fairly broad group of folks out there trying to bring question-time to America. Axelrod evidently shot it down:
POLITICO asked White House senior adviser David Axelrod about the
possibility of regular question time on Monday, before the online
campaign was announced, and he said the president's aides were more
likely to look for one-shot opportunities for Obama to engage with
Republicans.
"The thing that made Friday interesting was the spontaneity," Axelrod
said. "If you slip into a kind of convention, then conventionality will
overtake the freshness of that."
I think that's basically true. As much as I liked last week, I could see this thing quickly becoming a racket. I'm convinced that a lot of the questions asked last week, were basically attempt to score points. Frankly, even watching the Democrats yesterday I didn't feel much different. (Did Blanche Lincoln have an actual, real question?)
I guess I could be wrong, but I deeply suspect that what's wrong with our national conversation is about more than a lack of information. This is the most information-rich era in American history. I'm not convinced that the problem is a simple matter of better outlets. I think it's probably deeper than that and has something to do with us as Americans, and what we want out our politicians. I'd like it to be so, but I'm not convinced that what Americans want out of their politicians is more wonkery.
I'm listening to Harry Reid at the start of Obama's question time with Democratic senators. I'm sure the country appreciates hearing Reid pat himself and his senators on the back for all that they've accomplished. That will do wonders. He should have left the accolades to Obama.
There's some talk below about what role race played in Henrietta Lacks' treatment. Here's the author on Fresh Air:
GROSS: Was this a standard procedure then, or was this considered experimental?
Ms. SKLOOT:Absolutely standard. And this is one of the interesting things, it's
sort of an important point in the history of Henrietta Lacks. Her story
has often been held up as one of, you know, these sort of, you know,
awful, white doctors who did these really kind of vicious treatments to
her and stole her cells without telling her because they knew they'd be
valuable, and that really wasn't the case at all.
They were
taking cervical cancer tissues from any woman who walked into Hopkins
with cervical cancer, and this was absolutely the standard treatment.
And, in fact, it was considered the sort of top of the line.
But,
you know, there are other questions about, you know, this was a colored
ward. This was the Jim Crow era. You know, the reason she was at
Hopkins in the first place was because she was black, and there were
not really many other hospitals around where she could have gotten
treated. She also had no money, and Hopkins was a charity hospital. So
she was in the public wards. And, you know, there have been plenty of
studies that have looked at how segregation affected health care
delivery.
So she did get the standard care of the day, but she
was definitely sent home -many times after her radiation treatment, she
came back complaining of various pains and was sent home and sent home
and sent home until she eventually refused to go home and said no, put
me in the hospital. And at that point, her cancer had spread so much,
and there probably wasn't anything the doctors could have done either
way. But, you know, the question of how race played into her health
care is a hard one to answer.
I just want to add that one thing I've tried to do is get us away from seeing racism/white supremacy as the work of evil immoral hobgoblins, conspiring to do their worst to black people. If it were ever that easy, there would be no racism, and there never would have been any white supremacy. When I wrote:
On another point, I'm almost certain I'll never read this book. This
has everything to do with me, and nothing to do with the quality of the
book, which I'm sure is top-notch. It's just that after awhile, you
come to some understanding about the broad truth of black people in
this country. Once I got that--once I understood that African-Americans
have historically been this country's great unwashed--stories like this
are almost predictable.
Again, that's not a slight on the book,
and it's a slight against stories like this. Part of how I've come to
that understanding is by reading books exactly like this one. (Bad Blood for instance.) But for me personally, I think I've answered the question that this book would help me to explore.
I did not so much mean to leave people with the impression that "clearly they targeted her because she was black" so much as to point out that it's virtually impossible to seriously consider any black person in 1951--a time when white supremacy was practiced in almost every sphere--without thinking about race, about without thinking about black people as the country's great unwashed.
It's certainly possible to say that her treatment at the hospital "was standard practice." But when you understand the incredible web of racism which gripped this country in 1951, it becomes very hard to look at any black person living in that time and say "this would have happened exactly the same way to anyone." Racism altered everything.
It's never been clear to me that the Tuskegee experiments were performed strictly because the farmers were black. Indeed, it would not shock me at all if at that very moment, some doctors, somewhere in America, were doing something equally heinous to a group of whites. Morever, some of the black people who assisted thought they were actually helping. It's about more than exclusive villainy. Being black isn't just about being singled out for a particular fate, it's about a disproportionate chance that you will suffer a particular fate.
The Times has a review of Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks was a black woman in Baltimore, who died of particularly deadly form of cervical cancer. But her cancerous cells basically became the holy grail of medicine:
To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became
known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters
of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks's cancerous cervix,
taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture,
becoming "immortal" and changing the face of modern medicine. There
are, Ms. Skloot writes, "trillions more of her cells growing in
laboratories now than there ever were in her body." Laid end to end,
the world's HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times.
Because
HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a "mythological
intensity," they could be used in test after test. "They helped with
some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine,
chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization," Ms.
Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect
humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson's disease and AIDS.
They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of
human cells in zero gravity.
CitizenE wrote in this morning to highlight this devastating quote from Lacks' impoverished descendants:
"She's the most important person in the world, and her family living in
poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health
insurance?"
Obviously, one could nitpick with this statement (Medicaid). But some familiarity with how we calculate poverty in this country, as well as Medicaid eligibility requirements, reveals that such nitpicking doesn't really answer the question.
On another point, I'm almost certain I'll never read this book. This has everything to do with me, and nothing to do with the quality of the book, which I'm sure is top-notch. It's just that after awhile, you come to some understanding about the broad truth of black people in this country. Once I got that--once I understood that African-Americans have historically been this country's great unwashed--stories like this are almost predictable.
Again, that's not a slight on the book, and it's a slight against stories like this. Part of how I've come to that understanding is by reading books exactly like this one. (Bad Blood for instance.) But for me personally, I think I've answered the question that this book would help me to explore.
I think I'll buy a copy to support. The work has to go on.
A time of reckoning is approaching. In the next few years my beautiful and brilliant spouse will finish up her undergrad work, and then go tackle her dream. That dream (which we shall leave unsaid for now) could potentially land me in a land where certain cultural barriers will come into play. This is not about white people per se. Oh sure had you told me ten years ago that I might end up in, say, Oregon, I'd have stabbed you with my Afro pick, sung the second verse of our National Anthem (Stony the road we trod, Negroes) and then waved the red, black and green.
But I'm enlightened now, and all postracial up in this piece. I don't just have white friends, I have flavors of white friends--Italian white friends, German white friends, Jewish white friends, even white friends who insist their not white (those would the Jews.) The point is that I'm all into everything, I can even now admit that, yes, Christie Brinkley was hot. I'm so proud of myself. Sometimes I forget that most of my audience is white. But only for an hour.
And yet despite my new found tolerance, I'm aware that there are some barrier that even I--archon of the color-blind--can not transcend. Among them, as we've noted here, are the barber shop. Hence I've always wondered what the one brother out in Idaho (Not Boise) does to keep the fresh caesar. Should I just go to barber school now? Should I just resign myself to the busted 'Fro? What do you do when you need a cut but your one of the 2 percent in Sioux Falls?
Truth be told, I'm kind of a dandy. And every day I approach this reckoning with no way out. My greatest worry is landing in one of these towns where Negroes are so rare, you don't just speak when you see each other, you hold an entire conversation and then exchange numbers. I'm not fit to survive in such climes. So I'm calling on cats from Parker, Arizona (1.88 percent black) Lakewood, Washington (1 percent population), Nitro, West Virginia (0.25 percent) and other parts unknown to Negroes.
What's a black man in America--Real America--to do?
Signed, About to thrown in dreads, racial profiling be damned...
Ezra tackles Paul Ryan. I won't pretend to understand everything I read. But I understood enough it to (gasp!) want to know more about Ryan's solutions to health-care. He actually sounded serious. Loved this piece of rhetoric:
This is my 12th year. If I lose my job over this, then so be it. In
that case, I can be doing more productive things. If you're given the
opportunity to serve, you better serve like it's your last term every
term. It's just the way I look at it. I sleep well at night.
Maybe it's true of Ryan, maybe it's not--I'm counting on some Wisconsin people to fill me in. But it's the kind of attitude a lot of Congressfolk could use.
One problem with open threads is that your commenters often scoop you. Oh well, as reported yesterday by own comments section, Sarah Palin and progressives are apparently in agreement that Rahm Emanuel needs to go.
Whenever this comes up, I'm always "Meh." I said this last week, I think President Obama knows exactly what Rahm Emmanuel is all about. If Rahm is out there freelancing, then Obama is doing a poor job managing him. If Rahm is speaking the truth that liberals should save their powder for Obama.
I may be getting this wrong, but I think we go after Rahm because, given all his bluster and lust for hippie-punching, he makes for a more inviting target. I guess. I just don't think he does much without his boss's approval.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
