Racism from FOX can be expected, that is racism from the right. But racism from the center and the left also has to be expected. That is where America as a country is today. Barack Obama promises to be Race 2.0. Racism still exists, but in a post-racism environment, race still matters. Identity never goes away, it is never supposed to go away. Racism can be outright, vicious, shameless. But it can also be sophisticated, it can also pass for progressive thinking, like the title of this article below. And you thought the word "negro" had been retired. We have been talking of African Americans for decades now.
The only thing Obama is running for is President Of The United States. He has a magic touch to retail politics, kind of like Bill Clinton, who fought his own Southern demons.
Obama has a past going back hundreds of years, and he proudly claims so. He talks of his grandfather being a "houseboy to the British .... so don't tell me I am not coming home when I am coming to Selma." Black people do not walk around wearing their blackness on their lips any more than white people go around wearing their whiteness. The white identity is a porridge. There are rich strands of ethnic identities within that white identity that have lead to civil wars within the past decade. So don't oversimplify.
Obama is not trying to fit in to the white imagination. Heck, he is not trying to fit in, period. He is who he is. And he is running for president.
Obama's biography talks of at least one white girlfriend who gave up saying she "can't be Black." In a country where 99.9% of the people marry within their own race, Obama's black to black marriage is hardly news. Is Clinton's? Marriage is private.
Obama is deeply devoted to his family. Beyond that is private.
This is LA Times. There is so much movie talk. Talk some reality. Talk up sociological studies. Talk up your own personal experiences. Movie review after movie review after movie review do not throw light on the candidacy of Obama. He is running for president, he is not in the race for an Oscar.
"That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son." This statement is offensive beyond the blue. This is racist. Obviously this writer has no idea what the President Of The United States does on a day to day basis. The POTUS runs a country. The POTUS sits on top of a state machinery that is unprecedented in its power. Obama is running to get elected leader of the free world. He is not running to make white people feel good about themselves. The White House is not a movie set. This columnist is confusing between a movie screen and a TV screen.
Okay, so if you keep digging and digging into the column, you get to discover the guy is black, the writer is black. That does not change a thing. Blacks struggle with race just like whites do. And there is plenty of internalized racism going round the block.
The vast majorities of blacks are not ready for some black dude who seems to have cross-racial appeal. Black leaders are supposed to lead black people, not both black and white people. That has been the thinking. Well, I guess that thinking will have to make way for Barack Obama.
The truth is boring. The guy just wants the job. It is a job. The stock of the black people is not going to dramatically improve just because Barack Obama is president, although improve it will, because he is a progressive, a Democrat, someone who is talking of universal health care, and ending the war in Iraq. Black or white, he just wants your vote. A businessman, he would have asked for your dollar.
This column talks more of the struggles of this columnist, and perhaps many black men like him, than it does of Barack Obama the candidate, and that is just fine. When Bill Clinton ran for president, many fatherless people got to feel it is okay, it is not okay, but then it is okay that you don't have a father, you can still be president. It is okay to be black and struggling with your identity. It is fine. It is more than okay to talk about it, so talk. But the campaign is going to focus on health care and other issues.
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Obama the 'Magic Negro' The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man. By David Ehrenstein, L.A.-based DAVID EHRENSTEIN writes about Hollywood and politics. March 19, 2007 AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House. But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro." The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.-wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro . He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is "Magic." Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!) The same can't quite be said of Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Seven" and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in "The Shining," in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." The film's sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you? And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton's whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial "goodwill.") But the same can't be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son. The senator's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, "magically." He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing? The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be. Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media). Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
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Media giants to compete with YouTube Los Angeles Times, CA News Corp. and NBC Universal said today that they were creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends. .... Google is expected to gobble up nearly a third of all online advertising revenue this year .... the most disruptive force your business has seen ever ...... "This is a game changer for Internet video," Chernin said. "We'll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want -- professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live." ..... YouTube, which Google bought in November for $1.65 billion, draws more viewers than the television networks' combined online audience ...... Google executives' disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co. .... "The biggest challenge will be to see how the parents of conglomerates work together in decision-making," said Bourkoff, the media analyst. "Is this going to be a great press release, or will it actually function as a business?" ...... fear that giving programming to Google and YouTube could weaken their leverage in subsequent negotiations
