Andrew Sullivan seems to be in a tiff with Glenn Reynolds over a picture of President Obama and Vice President Biden. This is getting some play on both the left and the right. There’s an accusation of racism being floated at Reynolds, though nothing in his post suggests that that is most definitely the cause for Reynold’s complaint. And yet, some of Reynold’s commenters reveal their racialist bent of mind at his prompting – when asked to caption the photo, some commenters cast President Obama in the role of a drug dealer. Ugh. Because a black man, no matter how accomplished, can be ridiculed with drug dealer jokes, right? If there was no racial intent, my bad, but as the saying goes… if it looks like a duck and quacks like one – it just might be a duck.
More disturbing than cranks on the right with their willful viciousness, is the defense from the left. They assert that when one zooms up close, the president looks “uppity” or “condescending” to his white subordinate, and that this must be what got Reynolds riled up. Maybe so. But having looked at the whole picture, and the zoomed up version, I have yet to see any appearance of uppitiness, condescension, drunkenness, or any other such look. I saw the president listening intently to the vice president, from an angle that forces his eyes downward – because the president is in fact, taller than the vice president.
It seems to me that any attempt to see this in any other light is reaching … and the reach is because the president is black.
Editing to add two points: 1 – the controversy hipped me to the flickr stream – which is just AWESOME. So, I’m glad for that… and 2 – I guess it might be helpful if I upload the picture???
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talk before the start of the Kennedy Center Honors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Dec. 6, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Remember that saying? That was early hip hop/r & b. Don’t know if white people talked about the flip side – I think the mainstream term was “B” side, from which you also got “B” movies (I think). Anyway…
I quoted on this blog and elsewhere, with some bemusement, about some whites who were clearly either racist, ignorant, or both, but who were voting for Barack Obama. I recalled with a good deal of approval, the Ohio man who thought Obama was a muslim, but was leaning toward voting for him anyway. (And this was BEFORE the financial meltdown!) I quoted somewhere the couple who proudly declared that they were “voting for the n*gg*r”. Change comes slow – and people are who they are. I appreciated all the stories like that. These, after all, are the white folks who won’t be easily integrated – but who will, it seems, be able to live comfortably in a pluralistic world, just the same.
OK, but that’s me looking at white people. What’s on the flip side? As is always true – there is no equivalence here – there is no racism against whites in this video – but having said that – this video is not safe for work…
The Bahá’í calendar is more appropriately called the “Badi” or “wonderful” calendar. It is wonderful, because one of the Prophets of the Bahá’í faith designated, for each day, each month, and even each year, an Attribute of God – providing a personal reflection for every day. In the Bahá’í understanding attributes of God are also known as “Names of God” and so have the effect of invoking the Creator of all the Worlds. Hence, besides being a personal reflection, each birthday is a personal invocation.
The Badi calendar began in 1844, and consists of 19 months of 19 days each. It adds four or five intercalary days to complete the year. The largest unit of the Badi calendar is the Kull-i-Shay – a period of 361 years – which themselves are divided into 19 year divisions, each called a Váhid (unity).
WASHINGTON — Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration — that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime.
The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
I honestly feel quite torn on this issue. We never should have had this situation – but now that we do – how are we supposed to undo it without creating new, awful precedent, and without creating security vulnerabilities?
Perhaps the only way out of this is to apply Bob Cesca’s fear solution and just try them as best as possible in civilian courts. Our rule of law has to be more important than any one criminal – terrorist though he may be.
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.
A group of seniors in Michigan came up with a great little dance (they call it a hustle, but it looks a lot like the electric slide, which was more of a bus stop kind of dance) for if Obama wins. Seriously – we’ve got 10 days to learn it. Get going!
