The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Every year or so we get another story about police brutality toward blacks.  Yet another unarmed man shot in the back – and the news media playing it really quietly. I’m doing my part to raise the profile:

Crossposted at Wind On Water.net

QT

Here’s a nice slideshow: http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/gallery-from-the-slavehouse-to-the-whitehouse/

One slide is not captioned well – I think it’s inaccurate to claim that Harriet Tubman started the Underground Railroad. But in all, it’s a nice pictorial stroll through African-American history.

Here too is a National Geographic “Trip on the Underground Railroad.”

QT

Yesterday’s news was pretty momentous, and I’ve been struggling to weigh it all. I thought I would post yesterday, but I wasn’t quite ready.

Yesterday, OJ Simpson was found guilty of armed robbery and whatever else he was charged with.
Yesterday research into Michelle Obama’s family history traced back to slavery.
Yesterday, Lee Stranahan made a joke about reparations.

Yesterday I found myself feeling really overwhelmed with racial stuff – including how comfortable some white people are with talking flippantly about stuff like this. Maybe that’s not really fair. No – it’s definitely not fair. But it’s how I really feel.

Anyway – Lee’s invocation of the term “reparations” in conjunction with the rest made me think about the idea, and reflect again on what kind of reparations would really be meaningful. I honestly don’t care about or want any more congressional apologies. And – I don’t want any money from the government. All that looks like is economic stimulus in blackface. But Obama’s efforts on behalf of his wife point in the right direction of what I’d really like to see.

It would be meaningful, and genuinely reparative, if the government paid for secured, single-purpose (no using it for anything else) dna tracing of every black person who is not an immigrant from Africa, back to Africa. That is – the US, coupled with various European nations, should team up to pay for the testing of African Americans and Afro Carribeans, to restore some little bit of what so many Europeans take for granted – a deep sense of lineage. The loss of that sense is a direct result of slavery, and it is within the power of these governments to take reparative action in this regard.

I haven’t much wanted Barack Obama to be a “black president” – other than to have the confidence to simply show up and be – the consequence of which is to make being black just as normal and mainstream as anything else. But this is something that it would be very meaningful for him to do – something FOR black people that doesn’t lay guilt at the feet of whites who may not have had anything to do (even ancestrally) with slavery, but which genuinely repays us for some of the harms done.

QT

Update @ 12/16/2008: Obama names Wizipan Garriott of the Rosebud Sioux to the transition team in the role of First Nations Liaison.

Here, an Ex Isler named Joe D’Monix, himself of the First Nations, mentions that Sioux is not actually the preferred term – rather, that Wizipan is from the Lakota tribe. Thanks, Joe!

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I haven’t had much criticism for President Elect Obama. I, like most Americans, think he’s doing a great job. BUT – I am worried that a particular promise is not being kept – and I’m going to keep this issue alive on this blog until it’s addressed. I would hate to think that the nation’s first black president would keep a tradition of breaking promises to the native americans (or, First Peoples, as he called them during the campaign).

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/19/obama_adopted_into_crow_nation.html

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/even_more_prop_8.php

One guess at what group feels they were robbed of “meaningful gender identities,” and thus likely long for them with a much greater intensity than the rest of the populace. It’s quite likely that the same impulse that would attract men by the hundreds of thousands of men to the Million Man March–the sense that something had been lost–is the same impulse them that would lead them to reject an expansion, and to their mind, a redefinition of marriage.

A very good point. Another: the feeling that black people’s marriages are persistently under attack. A clinging to traditional marriage as a cure for some of the ills that affect black people is a characteristic of black America that is under-appreciated.

This is from Richard Ford’s article that Ta-Nehisi is quoting:

After all, traditional marriage isn’t just analogous to sex discrimination—it is sex discrimination: Only men may marry women, and only women may marry men. Same-sex marriage would transform an institution that currently defines two distinctive sex roles—husband and wife—by replacing those different halves with one sex-neutral role—spouse. Sure, we could call two married men “husbands” and two married women “wives,” but the specific role for each sex that now defines marriage would be lost. Widespread opposition to same-sex marriage might reflect a desire to hang on to these distinctive sex roles rather than vicious anti-gay bigotry. By wistfully invoking the analogy to racism, same-sex marriage proponents risk misreading a large (and potentially movable) group of voters who care about sex difference more than about sexual orientation.

After all, many opponents of same-sex marriage don’t oppose gay rights across the board. In California, same-sex couples enjoy significant civil rights protections and legal status as domestic partners, and voters have shown no interest in changing that. National polls show that overwhelming majorities support employment-based gay rights, including equal access to careers in the military, and same-sex civil unions. It’s only when it comes to marriage—the word, with its religious as well as civic connotations—that pro-gay sentiment dwindles: Recent polls show that only 30 percent to 36 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It’s this finding, of course, that the results of last week’s elections echo.

The sharp differences in the polling numbers, depending on whether the question is marriage as opposed to almost any other gay rights issue, suggest that opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t simply the 21st century’s form of racism. After all, whites who opposed racial miscegenation in the Jim Crow South didn’t support other civil rights for blacks or civil unions for mixed-race couples. In fact anti-miscegenation laws worked hand-in-glove with laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage and intimate cohabitation of unmarried adults to effectively outlaw interracial intimacy altogether. When Mildred Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, successfully challenged Virginia’s law barring interracial marriage, they were not just fighting for social acceptance and hospital visitation rights. They were fighting a jail sentence, suspended on the condition that they leave the Virginia and never return together: effective banishment from the state. Anti-miscegenation laws were designed to prevent intimate racial mixing of any kind; by contrast, many of the people who voted to ban same-sex marriage are apparently supportive of same-sex intimacy—provided you don’t call it marriage.

Coates is not overwhelmingly persuaded, but I quoted more than he did because I think there’s a “there” there.

QT

The purpose of this blog is to avoid partisan politics but to talk about this time – the effect of the Obama candidacy on our country. I’ve focused mainly on race, though I’d hoped to get into discussion of gender (Sarah Palin helped me focus there a bit) and the wider discussion of culture – proposition 8 brought out a culture discussion, but I also hoped to talk a little bit about some of the right in front of our face happenings – like when Obama brought the house down doing his brush his shoulders bit. What a moment!

The Republican Party is having a bit of an identity crisis as a result of the Obama and Palin candidacies. Sarah Palin rallied the religious conservative base of the Republican party while wholly alienating the conservative “elite.” Given a choice, I’d choose that “conservative elite” – education and thoughtfulness deserve to be not only acceptable, but preferred qualities. Barack Obama exemplifies both, which in the long run thrilled his supporters (more on this later!). But the landslide victory of Obama over McCain was partially the result of African Americans and Latino voters going overwhelmingly for Obama. Combine that with an overwhelming youth vote favoring Obama, including a good chunk of evangelical youth, and you can see the problem the republican party is having – demographically they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The internal debate on this very issue has begun – with Gov. Michael Steele, one of the most prominant African-Americans in the Republican party – stepping up to run for the chairmanship of the party. And here is a debate between Pat Buchanan and a republican strategist – who happens to be African American:

QT

Found this online.

I have been trying to think about how to put my thoughts down on such a momentous occasion – and honestly – I’ve not come up with anything brilliant. So here are some random thoughts:

- My mom called at 11:03 to celebrate, and then she called again at the end of the acceptance speech. She isn’t usually up that late, and she called me in tears. I had a few of my own.

- Day before Halloween, my son was asked by his classmates to dress up like Obama (he looks like Obama, a little bit). We don’t celebrate Halloween, and he didn’t want to be all dressed up, so he put it to a vote. “Find 75 people who want me to do it, and I’ll do it.” he said. They found 72, so he didn’t. Still – I thought it was funny, and flattering all at the same time that he was asked – he’s one of very few black males at his school – and certainly the only one who looks like an adult Obama (there are a handful of kids who look like the younger version, chubby cheeks and all, but my son is slender).

- Coming in to Grand Central this morning – it really felt that way – like scales had fallen from my eyes and the entire world looked different. I kept looking around to see signs of this new world – and couldn’t find any – everything looked the same – only… brighter. And… no newspapers anywhere on the stand. I’m sorry I didn’t get a souvenir, but wow… I mean – NO newspapers! ANYWHERE! Everyone in NYC is celebrating the historic moment. (I also, in keeping with the 21st century feel of the moment, compensated for not being able to get a newspaper by downloading today’s New York Times to my Kindle…)

- I wish I could have called my dad. I doubt we would have had anything to say to each other, but, I wish I could have called him. My stepmother too.

- I was all set for one of those great inspirational Obama-speeches, but in the first couple of minutes, I realized we weren’t going to get that. We were instead getting a nose-to-the-grind invitation. Of the two – I’m glad we got the latter. I am very much looking forward to seeing an administration where we the people are invited to participate, rather than one which hides from us and lies to us.

- Nate Silver on the race and class issues in DC: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/in-nations-capital-pandemonium-after.html

– Ta-Nehesi Coates liveblogs The Moment: http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/presidents_to_represent_me_1.php

– Bob Cesca on radio! www.wjfk.com (Posted that mostly for myself – I missed him on the show last night and want to try to catch a recording of it.)

Tomorrow I hope to post on blacks and Proposition 8…. but today I’m celebrating!

QT

When I was a young girl, my grandmother purchased the apartment building she’d lived in. I lived there with my dad and my mom. My aunt, my dad’s sister, and her children (my cousins) lived there as well. This was in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, NY. Then, as now, Bedford-Stuyvesant was known as a tough neighborhood, and my mom and dad, as soon as could be arranged, purchased a house in an entirely different section of Brooklyn. My aunt moved out after awhile too – she moved to New Jersey.

My parents divorced when I was 8, and not too long after that, my father remarried – and moved back into my grandmother’s apartment building. He, being a community organizer, believed firmly in reinvesting in the community. Besides creating a community services center in the storefront of my grandmother’s building, my father and my stepmother purchased a number of other properties on the block. The dream was to purchase, renovate, and make productive the many otherwise rundown or abandoned buildings in the community.

That they accomplished as much as they did (the purchase of the several properties) was impressive because they were not rich. If anything – they were lower middle class, and their only income was whatever they would earn from low-income housing (only sometimes collecting rents) and the small salaries they paid themselves from grants brought into the community service center.

Out of the community service center, my father and stepmother coordinated social services for people in the neighborhood. The peripherally (or actually) homeless, the poor seniors shut in and unable to get about to take care of their basic needs – these were their clients. Helping welfare moms find both work and childcare was part of what they did long before Clinton coined the term “workfare.” Sometimes over a summer break, I would work in the soup kitchen that they ran. My dad taught me never to look down on people. The worst criminal could be a productive member of society… my dad had a way of organizing recently paroled men into neighborhood watches or other volunteer service.

My father, unfortunately, failed to live up to his own highest aspirations. He became addicted to drugs and over time, lost everything. My father’s demise took its toll on the neighborhood – the shining hope that had once been there – the belief that something good could happen on Ralph Avenue, and that maybe the residents there could be a part of it, died with my father’s failures.

At the age of 60, my dad was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Years of cocaine use is hard on a heart. This summer I spent a lot of time on the old block. I was working to get my father off the block, and into senior housing. His wife had died at the start of the summer, and I had a hope against all hope that my father would finally have improved living conditions that would let him regain some of his health, and some hope for living. I asked him what he thought of Obama’s chances. He thought that Obama would win. I asked him if folks in the neighborhood were excited about it all… he said no.

In the end, even after getting my dad set up in decent housing, he died. He was only 63, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe he died clean. Hopelessness, when it sets in, is worse than cancer – and even the excitement of this moment doesn’t reach fully into the deepest part of the inner city. Nothing short of a win – and real results – will bring hope to communities that are used to black failure, both at our own hands, and at the ever-present hand of racism.

So – today, with only a day and change left to this election season, I’m offering the one reason I never let myself offer before, for why I want Obama to win. I want him to win because he’s black. Because – I want people who are teetering on the edge of hopelessness, who’ve seen it all, done it all, and don’t believe in change – I want them to see change happen. I want that self-defeatist doubt to finally be itself doubted… I want hope to become real for those who don’t dare to hope.

I’ve had lots of reasons to want Obama to win. I’ve come around on universal health care. I absolutely want green energy. I am sick of corruption going unchecked. I’m concerned that government has gotten too complex for the little people to monitor it. I think Obama can bring about change in all of those conditions. But just for today – I want Obama to win, because I want it to be finally proven that it really CAN happen. And I want him to be a kick-butt president, because I have already seen what it looks like when a brilliant man with a generous heart and an innovative mind lets himself and others down. Obama has proven, against lots of odds, not least of which includes beating the trajectory of drug involvement, that he can deliver. I want to see him do it.

When my father died, it fell to me to go through his things, decide what to keep and what to toss. In a suit pocket, I found 2 dollars. It was all he had to his name. I promised to do a good deed with those two dollars, because as a Baha’i, I believe that good deeds done in the name of the deceased help their souls in the hereafter. I put one dollar in the bucket at a 12 step meeting – one that my father would have qualified for had he ever availed himself of the opportunity. I donated $20 And to the nice round number of 20, I’m adding $1. So, that’s 20 from me, and 1 from my dad, in support of hope, and change.

I donated directly at Barack Obama’s site and as part of Bob Cesca’s fundraising drive, which is here: https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/pf?outreach_page_id=69867

QT