Why Lady Rothschild’s Rhetoric Against Obama Is Inherently Racist

After taking the time to write an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining why she in now switching her allegiance to John McCain, former Democratic Platform Committee-woman and long-time fundraising surrogate of Hillary Clinton, Lady Rothschild has gone the offensive against Barack Obama. On Thursday morning she seemed to have had a sleepover at the CNN studios in order to continue her curious and garbled broadsides against the Democratic nominee. Her actions and comments appear to be truly personal. To a seasoned observer however, there could be no doubt that they are inherently racist.

Remember now, this is a woman who married into the truly elite billionaire Rothschild family. Yet, she says that she is supporting his opponent because she feels that Obama is “full of himself”. “He is an elitist” she says who “thinks that he is better than everyone else”. His elitism she continues is just “something that you know when you see it!” and he is full of “rhetoric with no substance!” Umm! Curious indeed!

In America, racism is treated like some deformed child that the family keeps hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there, but we really not supposed to talk about it. Unfortunately, I’ve never subscribed to such foolishness.

Her comments are actually a throwback to the barbaric macabre days of Jim Crow Apart-Hate. It was a brutal time when accomplished (especially well dressed) Black men were often deemed ‘uppity’ (read ‘elite’ /’celebrity’) and actually lynched north and south at the slightest whim of White accusation.

So too, Lady Rothschild has easily fallen in line with the Karl Rove racist three part strategy to defeat Barack Obama. It goes like this: Part One: The Countee Cullen (‘to make a poet Black and bid him sing!’). Ultimately, this was only accomplished by linking him with the forged image of an angry Black man. Part Two: The Eloquent Trickster. No matter how replete his speeches or comments always maintain that ‘there is just no substance whatsoever!’ It is all ‘just rhetoric’; like the proverbial empty suit. He is to be painted in the stereotypical guise of a Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, or Eddie Murphy caricature. No matter what he says, always maintain that he is just ‘jive talking’. At last, Part Three: The ‘Uppity’-‘Elite’-‘Celebrity’ Negro. “Hey, look at him. He thinks he’s better than us. Lynch him. Lynch him!” That’s What’s Up!

Keep you eyes open for the October Surprise; the ‘new and reveling’ Weather Underground connection. Mark my words!

We Have Been To The Mountiantop

“America will be ready for a Black president in 40 years!”

Bobby Kennedy 1968



America’s Promise

It was an hour before midnight on a warm summer night. The nation was already duly immersed within the throes of an unprecedented political season and all of a sudden history would pause for just a moment in order to take note of a remarkable convergence of time and space. It would all ultimately come together high upon the summit of a mile-high mountaintop over-looking a nation facing an extraordinary crossroad. This was the fulfillment of prophesy set to the innovative rhythms of a unique cosmic rendezvous. Forty year ago, none other than beloved Bobby Kennedy had accurately predicted that this day was certain to arrive. He assured us back then that he had seen it for himself. It was exactly three years since the wrath of Katrina. It was 53 years to the day since Emmett Till’s gruesome murder, and 45 years to the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in the stately glare of the seat of American governance in order to tell the world about a dream that he had. Decades later, wide awake and perfectly on time, in a speech that is sure to go down in history for all of its soaring eloquence and complexity, Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States.

Two generations ago, while standing steadfastly upon the shores of a nation woefully engulfed within the violent throes of yet another effort to once more to remake itself, perhaps even Bobby Kennedy may not have truly imagined that Dr. King had an even greater purpose in mind. Like some kind of time-traveler, just moments before he died, King as well had assured us that he too had already surveyed this very same singular space and time. He urged us back then to have faith that we would ultimately get to the Promise Land; even if he could not be there with us. He knew this he said because he had been there and seen it for himself.

In the midst of Campaign 2008, on this particular day, history would recall a young political golden child from Chicago, who would seem to set up a stately seat of governance of his own. In time, he would lead millions of people from around the world to a higher place way above the nation in order that we too could view just what it was that Dr. King had actually seen when he himself had stood upon the mountaintop and looked over. Here was King’s witness upon the mountain. Nevertheless, then and now, it still remained up to us alone to create the Beloved Community. Gandhi was indeed correct. We were the change that we were looking for. The time was at hand. This Obama counseled was America’s Promise.

One year previous to the day that a lone assassin’s bullet would cut short his life, in the spring of 1967 Dr. King became the first prominent leader to forcefully speak out against the Vietnam War. From that moment on, he was variously vilified throughout the country. J. Edgar Hoover deeply hated him, as much as he hated nearly every prominent Black leader since Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He never hesitated to use the enormous resources of the United States government to prove as much. Dr. King would live the last year of his life under the constant ire of certain death looming evermore as a threat to him and to his young family. Racists called him “Dr. Martin Luther Coon”. He seemed to provoke the deepest levels of psychopathic racism, and many of today’s aging cabal of civil rights leaders who have made their fame and their fortune posing as the fateful and dedicated lieutenants of Dr. King, during his greatest hour of need, they were no where to be found. Many who now claim to have been amongst his most ardent supporters simply----‘got somewhere’ when he needed them most. However, King never tired in his quest to build The Beloved Community. Over just the last few years King’s Tomb has become one of the nation’s most traveled destinations, as people from all over the world have come to discover in him a universal symbol of spiritual probity. His enormous egalitarian spirit would ultimately come to captivate the entire world.


Country First

“This election is not going to be about issues!”
Rick Davis, Campaign Manager John McCain for President

A candidate campaigning for President of the United States is actually auditioning at every moment for their job. It is the most public interview in the world. They will have to motivate and move enormous resources on a daily basis. The way that they manage and run their campaign, the way that they organize their party’s convention, and who they choose to ultimately be by their side as Vice President are but a few measures that provide the public an opportunity to gaze into the window of their judgment and ability to lead. In time, both Barack Obama and John McCain would face their next test in the organization of their respective conventions. Suddenly, just days before the Democratic Convention conservative evangelist Stuart Shepard stood in Invesco Field and boldly asked his followers to pray that it might rain upon Barack Obama’s acceptance speech that coming Thursday. Ironically enough, one week later, Hurricane Gustav aimed its sights on New Orleans and threatened to become a new Storm of the Century. The Republicans were forced to take the unprecedented step of canceling the first day of their own convention. However, never one to weary for wear Bubba could still be found making his own brand of mischief in his backyard.

On Wednesday night day three of the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama made a surprise appearance on the stage after Joe Biden’s acceptance speech. The Vice Presidential nominee appeared to be genuinely surprised. However, among other things, Obama casually told his world audience that on the following morning they would be moving “everything” across the street, down the road and to the Mile High Stadium. This was mentioned as if it was simply no big deal. Yet, numerous crews would need to be organized and enormous resources and materials would have to be carefully packed up as Obama’s team essentially would have to create an enormous megalith and carefully carry it to Mile High Stadium. Furthermore, this was to occur during what was essentially a non-stop national event. It was to happen during what is for some a rather special time every four years when the national media is aggressively dedicated to filming every single moment of what has actually become a 24 hour event. On a much smaller scale of course, this was somewhat akin to a chef interviewing for a job and preparing a meal for his potential employer directly in front of his watching eyes. All of this would appear to have gone off without a hitch.

Early that following morning, cameras from around the world were anxiously fixed upon what had suddenly become for the Republican opposition an oddly controversial event. Contrary to the traditional protocol of political conventions, whereby each side normally respects the other’s event, the Republicans acted out with total indifference and disrespect to Barack Obama and the Democrats. Nevertheless, with the exception of Jack Cafferty of CNN and columnist Carl Bernstein no one seemed to notice. Throughout that entire week, the Mc Cain Campaign constantly made rude and unprecedented attempts to beg themselves into the coverage of the Democratic Convention. Each day, they sent out press releases first seeking to constantly create controversy and then in an attempt to dramatically tease the idea that John McCain was soon to announce his Vice Presidential choice. After a time, their often oddly irate and borderline juvenile attempts to disrupt the Democrats went well beyond all established bounds of common decency. To seasoned observers it easily revealed a deep-seated incompetence and sense of desperation in the McCain Campaign.

Suddenly, at the dawn of the very last day of the convention, the Republicans appeared to become truly unhinged. As Obama’s crew was busy working like a small efficient army in full view of the entire world neatly assembling the stagecraft for the day’s event. With remarkable efficiency large white columns were being erected framing what was to become an elaborate blue stage protruding from a backdrop replica of a stately seat of governance. This was reminiscent of the scene of Dr. King facing the Lincoln Memorial as he delivered his speech 45 years earlier.

The McCain Campaign immediately went on the attack and began to childishly mock the construction of this backdrop as a Greek style Parthenon, a “Barackalopolis” they called it, in a coy attempt to show this in evidence of Obama’s by now notorious ‘elitism’. In purely political terms, the Republican’s behavior reached beyond disrespectful into the absurd. Yet, what was left unspoken was actually just how cleverly this backdrop was assembled; with all of its lights, sound, and fireworks ultimately going off without a hitch.

Hurricane Gustav ultimately bucked the mounting anticipation that it was sure to deliver a level of destruction reminiscent of Katrina; as it only caused moderate damage to the Louisiana swampland. For many though, this would become a queer opportunity for the Republican Administration to redeem itself after displaying such appalling ineptness which ultimately had caused the senseless death of so many lives on that fateful day three years earlier. When it was over, one conservative commentator was even so bold as to claim that “Gustav trumps Katrina!” ---- Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Nonetheless, the McCain Campaign shamelessly exploited the collective angst over this storm as an opportunity to unveil the new brand of their campaign. ‘Country First’ was a slogan meant to distinguish the ‘ultra-patriotic’ Republican Party from the ‘other Americans’; symbolized by the new African American Democratic nominee. This attitude was exemplified by John McCain’s accusation that Barack Obama would rather “win a campaign than loose a war!” Yet ‘Country First’ was only able to thinly veil the blatant cultural worldview of ‘Race First’; which easily revealed a recalcitrant White skin privilege that simply sought to use patriotism like a bludgeon.

For many observers however, the notion put forward by an almost totally White national convention that somehow they alone had the best interest of the entire country in mind, was strangely reminiscent of the racist barbarism that had become a vicious deadly staple of American life and culture for more than a century. It is what a gang of White men must have had in mind on that very same date decades ago in the summer of 1955 when they kidnapped, tortured, lynched, and mutilated a 14 year old Black child named Emmett Till in Money Mississippi, simply because they believed that he may have actually whistled at a White woman.

Left unspoken, mangled, distorted, and perpetually hidden from public discourse is the fact that for more than a century after chattel slavery had officially come to an end, the sheer barbarism and utter immorality of the ‘Peculiar Institution’ was shamelessly projected on to the newly freed Black community; which was still desperately seeking to regain a human footing in the world. This is what Fredrick Douglass was ultimately alluding to when he said that “The struggle for freedom in America is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies and White men’s minds!”

While the need for a true Human Rights agenda for African Americans truly begs for international oversight, what has also been left unspoken is the very vicious and viral psychopathology of racism. It remains a terribly acute neurosis throughout the country; such as would inspire millions of White Americans to act out in such savage acts of atrocity upon countless innocent Black Americans generation after generation. With this sick widespread culture of ‘us’ against ‘them’ left unchecked it is no wonder that this nation produces more serial killers than all other nations in the world combined.

After two remarkable weeks, the world was witness to two conventions and two campaigns, together presenting two very dissimilar views of the American Dream. After Katrina and in the midst of Campaign 2008 it would appear as if the nation was regurgitating some of the vilest aspects of its racist past. It would now become quite clear that the struggle of the 21st Century is the struggle between civilization and barbarism. It is about whether or not this nation will ultimately embrace an innovative multicultural globalized future, or simply remain mired in a bizarre xenophobic past.

Black Orchid in the White House Garden ---- Assailing Michelle Obama

“The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons, or brothers
Of her master!”

Fredrick Douglass




Where and When She Enters


Politics is the hyper-actualization of the zeitgeist of American life and culture. It speaks to the very soul of the nation from its own particular vantage point, garishly poised in the mirror and boldly facing down the physic crucible fronting scene and script of all that the nation collectively has been, and all that it has allowed itself the capacity to become. It is the narrative of the nation’s soul crystallized in campaign combat.

During the Bullwhip Days, as a most enticing however lurid habitual rendezvous played out in the quiet of the early wee hours of the morning. Set in the deafening hush tones of a stark ritual play, staged all throughout the American heartland no matter how near or far, in county after county. Often it was that when a female slave was to be found quite awhile away from her labors, this fact alone was enough to incite titillating cross-cultural gossip throughout the week. Who was this Black victim Mammy or one of Mammy and Master’s children? Was this Sapphire, or Jezebel? Not a hyper-sensitive moment was to be squandered seeking to resolve this latest bewildering community obsession, “Just what was Bubba doing in the basement?”

This was so because a Black woman was the legal property of her master and therefore could never legally be raped. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, Black woman’s bodies were wholly at the mercy of their White master. As absurd as it may seem, this fact continues to guide and mold the social and political discourse of this nation. It is one of the most accursed legacies in the intergenerational transmission of this nation’s recurring racial conflict. Today, the Black Jezebel has come to the forefront as one of the grand archetypes of the New Mythology that forcefully guide, mold, and define this society through its cultural production. However, she remains a tragic symptom rendered forever mum and unattended, sheltering a wound left festering and a child left hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there but once again, “We really not supposed to talk about it!”

After slavery, White men cowardly came to project the frequent Jack the Ripper-like attention that they had once wantonly displayed towards Black women’s bodies, on to the Black man. From this moment on, the maniacal specter of the Black male rapist fiendishly on the prowl for the chastity of pure White women, became the lurid and forced political a priori for the First Evil Birth of Jim Crow. This malicious deafening lie, and its crude female counterparts delivered in the stereotypes of Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and their filthy, naked, and unruly, ‘Picaninny’ children proved remarkably efficient propagandized upon an entire vulnerable and newly freed Black community; during the immediate aftermath of one of the most egregious seasons of man’s inhumanity to man. Sadly enough, these horribly negative images projected solely out of the pathology of Bubba’s own bitter neurosis in defeat of the war, would help to solicit an additional century of an even viler form of racist bloodlust. No longer a valued commodity, like a horse, a nightstand, or a toilet, the premium upon Black life in this country would diminish precipitously, and the hundred-year struggle over this forged blood-drenched resolve came to redefine an entire society; for better or worse.

Nonetheless, emerging from out of the bitter wrath of life-long captivity you tell me, just what man would ignore the anxious immediate search for his own extended family, only to act out solely to express some queer phantom fiendish lust for the wife of his oppressor? There have often been times in the life of this nation, when simply to be born a Black man, was akin to being born with a gun pointed directly at your head. Most likely, it was a shot gun, leaving little possibility of finding the bullet. The Black woman today largely remains an enigma beyond the culture outside of her community, and often her intellect and strength illicit widespread fear of retribution. The truth, now deeply secreted back of the hidden resolve of tens of thousands of ruthless carnivals of blood-soaked rope and fire, pogroms sentencing Black flesh to the gruesome funeral pyre, is actually much simpler than that. More often than not, Whitefolk as always simply wanted to steal Colored-folk’s land. America is the great land grab of the Second Rise of Europe.

However, these two lingering projections boldly thrust out of the psychopathic racist personality, left at bay in the midst of the nation once again endeavoring to remake itself more than a century and a quarter ago, continue to mold and guide the unreconciled narrative of race in America. They are the twin pillars and the Mother Archetypes in the haunted lexicon of race and politics, and they are the macabre source of the very voices that Bubba thinks he keeps hearing in his head; extant today in the Campaign of 2008. Now that Barrack Obama has been linked to an angry Black man and stripped of his church, it was no stretch for Bubba to go after his wife Michelle.


Mary Turner’s Ghosts

Hair-braided chestnut,coiled like a lyncher's rope,Eyes--fagots,Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters,Breath--the last sweet scent of cane,And her slim body, white as the ashof black flesh after flame.

Jean Toomer


A young fragile 20 year old deeply religious woman in the spring of 1918, Mary Turner could never have imagined the truly inconceivable act of blood thirsty barbarism that would casually steal her husband’s life. Now, eight months pregnant and grieving in bitter painful agony, who could have imagined that a fate far more sinister and cruel was about to visit her and her unborn child as well?

Shortly after Hayes Turner was swept up and lynched in yet another wave of Jim Crow’s favorite pastime in Brooks County Georgia. Whence maniacal White mobs would run rampant in a bizarre lawless bloodlust, as if on some kind of vampirish prowl for Black flesh, Mary publicly voiced her pain crying out loud: “They gonna pay for what they did!” Oddly enough, her comments alone immediately solicited a rather bizarre reaction. Instantly, riding high upon its notoriety as one of the most racist institutions the nation, the Atlanta newspaper published her comments within hours. They were scored across its pages like a screaming bulletin board characterizing her aggrieved remarks as surly “disrespectful”, as if Mary had actually said something quite odious and truly threatening to the well being of the entire county. Even after the senseless murder of her husband, what she said in the midst of her misery somehow made the White community feel as if she was simply not “Proud to be an American”; therefore she was “Ungrateful” Bubba would write, and this alone would be enough to solicit a large White mob to arrive at her home in order to lynch her.

Fatigued, distraught, of course as you could imagine she was heavy with child and in utter fear for their lives; Mary hid overnight but was tracked down by the following morning. For the simple act of natural human anguish Mary Turner while eight months pregnant with child was dragged to a stream and hung upside down from a tree. Gasoline was poured all over her and set ablaze as her clothes were literally burned to ashes upon her withering body. Suddenly a man stepped forward brandishing a large fishing knife and cut the baby directly out of Mary’s stomach. The poor child gave out a cry as it fell to the ground, and another man came forward and smashed the baby’s skull with the heavy heal of his boot. Mary’s body was then pummeled with bullets and the stifling jeers of the crowd could be heard for miles in the distance. More than one hundred White men, women, and children all joyously watched this ghoulish unimaginable crime, their collective faces seemingly contorted in a rather bizarre look of overwhelming sexual glee. Over the course of the next two weeks, more than a dozen innocent Black people would also lose their lives in the mist of this senseless rampage. Ultimately, more than 500 Black families would flee to the north. However, not one individual was ever convicted or even accused of any crime for these serial murders. Not one member of the mob was ever reported to have ever received even a moment of counseling for their madness. Life for them would continue on as normal without skipping a beat. This is what Fredrick Douglass meant when he said that “The struggle for freedom in America is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies and White men’s minds!” and what Justice Harlan agued against in his lone dissent of Plessey vs. Ferguson. It is a legacy born in the psychopathic mind of Jim Crow.

For centuries, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and American Slavery implanted a venal prison plantation sex trade upon American soil, and this did not at all exist in an historical vacuum. It was but the latest salvo in the legendary clash of two completely contradictory cultural worldviews; one born of fire and the other born of ice. The variant seeds of two different cultures are no more diametrically in contradistinction to one another than that of the African and the European worlds. The Black woman is the central line of demarcation or the line in the sand if you will, of these two cultures. Space does not here afford us the luxury to sufficiently elaborate upon the full implications of these latent facts. Nevertheless, a more critical view of the forced image of the Black woman in American society does bare our greater scrutiny.

For tens of thousands of years, the ‘Womb’ was amply represented as the architectural crucible of African culture. The womb, as the foundation could be viewed as the sacred seed and ordering principle of life. Holding such prestige, pornography could never exist in this type of society, because the Womb could never be shown being publicly defiled. Women naturally carried themselves with a modest air of elegance, and a man who might seek to violate a woman, would naturally feel the whole weight of the entire community upon him when he sought to strike her. This was a self-fulfilling prophesy in the self defense of a nation. It is only in recent times with slavery and with the full impact of the Second Rise of Europe (the Maafa) upon African people, that this lifestyle has been disrupted. The traditional role of ‘Twinlinial’ governance in Black male female relations has been the central and most contentious source of European angst towards the Black community for thousands of years. Even though the Black woman as Madonna and Child remains by far the most enduring icon throughout the world, her stereotyped image in American Mythology provides some of the most prominent Archetypes in the collective subconscious of the American mind.

If Mary could not be raped, she surly could not be murdered as well. This is one of the most enduring prima facie articles of faith in the history of American law; recently witnessed in the Duke Rape Case (2006) and in the Rape of Tawanna Brawley (1987). It is the stuff about which legends have been made. In both of these cases, the lawyers defending these Black women were ultimately disbarred. Why? Was it because they had perpetrated a hoax upon the public trust? Or was it because a Black woman still cannot be legally raped by a White man in America? Recently, a police officer from Florida would actually tell me as much. He related the story to me of an incident that occurred during his first month on the Police Force. Officer Diop and his partner were called to investigate the rape of a Black woman, when suddenly they were stopped by their supervisor and told not to bother: “A Black woman cannot be raped!” they were told. “They consider it a party!” Mary was ‘thing-a-fied’, stripped of her humanity, mocked like a ‘Baby’s Momma’, scorned, made into a ‘non-person’, and then murdered in a ghoulish cleansing ritual during the light of day in a southern town. Her baby, like her limbs were simply trinkets at play, celebrated through collective cognitive dissociation as mere entertainment at the communal barbeque.

Weather it was to be manifest in the violent aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion, or even earlier through hard centuries of plantation rape and torture, or in the serial brutal video-taped police beatings of Black citizens that are so sadly commonplace in our world today, or in a concussion bomb launched in the guise of an eviction notice, that is somehow senselessly dropped upon a household by municipal decree (Philadelphia 1985), or even in the inconceivable community anguish of a loving innocent 92 year old grandmother who is somehow murdered by the very police who should have been earnestly working to protect her life (Atlanta 2006), or in the truly remarkable recurring scenes of an entire city sentenced to a Diaspora and still suffering right before our eyes in woeful national disregard. However it is to be experienced, collective racist trauma ratcheted up in such massive inhumane proportions, appears to exist for Africans in American in order to induce and maintain a fear-repressed collective memory; until their exists nothing more than a Black community that only lives in blackface. No other group in this society is so vehemently solicited to make a complete break with their own indigenous culture; and no other community remains so terribly mocked and scorned. With the exception of the Palestinians, it often appears that no other people on the planet than African Americans are so often told to simply forget their history. Nevertheless, today in America and throughout the world Mary and Hayes Turner, and their baby have not been forgotten. Of course, they must still vie for supremacy over the powerful globalized images of America’s Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and their nappy-headed children. Certainly, they are not the source of intellect at CNN or Bubba Fox News, nor sadly even a textbook footnote has appeared to linger for classroom discussion; but in much of the world today, they will never be forgotten. They have become a symbol of America’s soul.

The Creature from Madison Ave

Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

Revelation 2:20

Today, perhaps the most resilient grand archetype of New American culture is the troubled super-sexualized conniving Black Jezebel, born in Bubba’s backyard during the glory adolescent days of Jim Crow Apart-Hate, when Mary Turner was just a child. She is as old as the Vampire Lesstat, and as macabre in her many contortions. She was a throwback to White male oppression during the days of slavery, and often she was the object of the sex trade called ‘placage’ and then projected as collateral damage in the pedophilic inter-generational incestuous disregard of the White master for the humanity of his female slave; featured for years at the quadroon ball.

Today, hyper-sexualized and grossly ‘thing-a-fied’, she remains standard fare of the nation’s leading cultural production courtesy of Bubba and people like billionaire pornographer Bob Johnson of BET. During the Bullwhip days, she appeared first as the result of the rape of the docile unattractive and defenseless ‘Mammy’; although her parentage has always been in question. Directly after slavery, she suddenly shape-shifted in the bitterly contentious politics of the Reconstruction era, back to the deceitful light-skin seductress, along with her equally troubled sister the rebellious and loud mouthed ‘Sapphire’, who has variously appeared throughout the years. Today they are both woefully manifested in various shades along with a myriad of incarnations of Mammy as well. Jezebel and Sapphire still exist as supreme archetypes in the primordial cross-cultural narrative production of American life. They exist, extant of a neglected racial discourse, as the aggressive Black seductresses of Hollywood cinema, Television, Cable News and now thanks to Bob Johnson and BET, soon to debut in a Hip Hop video near you. Sadly enough, the active ingredients in cultural suicide no longer require the offense of a White provocateur. Jezebel would gain unique supremacy after Mammy lost her agency as the superior archetype, when Black people first gained just a little bit more freedom as a culture. Then and now, fear, anger, and guilt invert back of the reality motivating the political and social docu-drama, as Bubba once more projects his aberrant pathology upon an entire nation of people.

In Birth of a Nation, Jezebel arrives on the screen in the winter of 1915 as Lydia, the deceitful conniving vamp who in due course ruins an otherwise good White man’s life. She ultimately would not make her debut splash in film until her coveted role in the Blackploitation films of the 1970’s, during the very pre-dawn hours of the Second Reconstruction, as the nation was once again remaking its brand. However, first Hollywood would abide its slow fade to black in preference of the safer stock image of Mammy typified in Hattie McDaniel’s 1939 Oscar winning performance as ‘Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind. For five years, starting in 1974 Mammy long-suffering and docile, would continue to survive clinching her fist around her bible as Florida Evans or ‘Mamma’ in the television sitcom Good Times. In 1995 she bemoans the lack of good Black men as Gloria Mathews in ‘Waiting to Exhale’. She is the beat-down Oprah Winfrey character of Sophia in ‘The Color Purple’ (1985) and Sethe in ‘Beloved’ (1998). Yet, in the movie ‘Crash’ (2004) Thandie Newton revises a contemporary Jezebel who ultimately falls in love with the police officer who fondles her in front of her husband, for whom she has suddenly lost respect. In ‘Monster’s Ball’ (2001) Hallie Berry becomes only the first Black woman in more than a century of Hollywood history to win an Academy Award for Best Actress as Leticia Musgrove, the sex starved Jezebel who begs her husband’s executioner to please make love to her.

Earlier in the century, Jezebel had actually stuck around after slavery cleverly hidden in the basement, and she was given new life as a queer subconscious prerogative in the stock commercial logos of Madison Ave commerce. She would become the nominal choice for the latest celebrated public offering. Though largely taken for granted, for decades her voluptuous physique scantily clad and often grossly exaggerated fronted logos on an appalling myriad of packaging for an alarmingly vast array of goods in the everyday consumerism of the New Industrial American society. It is where Wall Street discovered very early on that it could re-live the past and curry a newfound brand loyalty all at the very same time; arousing dopamine levels by re-inventing the taboo sexual enticement of miscegenation, as Jezebel is once more fondled in the public marketplace. It is a fact that in the early 20th century the slave market would be reborn in virtual reality as the Black American woman was symbolically being casually fondled once again in lieu of her alleged wanton promiscuity. Jezebel and her ‘Picaninnys’ were deeply nurtured into the collective unconsciousness of the American mind, in the despicable images of Black people with grossly distorted features like huge bulging eyes, over-sized and bloated lips and buttocks. They images were massaged through the palms of the hand in the dollar-ism of everyday American life. The image of a Black woman and her poor nappy-headed children scorned, mocked, and ridiculed, adorned everything from flatware and ashtrays to soda pop well into the second half of the 20th Century. Much of this still exist today.

As a slim thin-lipped octoroon in the psychological thriller ‘Slow Burn’ (2005) Jolene Blakock is the classic Jezebel, as the seductive hip assistant district attorney Nora Timmer. Her ambiguous racial identity, seductive sexual demeanor, and forged air of vulnerability are the tools that she uses artfully to entice the men around her into a deadly web of greed and deceit in the middle of a mayoral campaign. She has a reputation for using her ‘street creds’ wisely and now, claming that she has been raped by a Black man that she recently seduced, it is her schizophrenic quest for identity cloaked in her inviting sexual promiscuity that super-charges her irresistible allure. In the end, as Jackie Longbrough she emerges the victor however alone in the world, after political scandal and murder have completely enveloped the men in her midst. Together Whitney Huston and Michele Lamar Richards create a unique composite of Jezebel, in the popular 1992 movie ‘The Bodyguard’. Huston is Jezebel as Rachel Marron, the successful slim sultry Black superstar pop singer; and Richards is Nikki, her older less successful sister. Nikki is the more voluptuous light-skinned sister, Jezebel’s alter ego who appears to be of mixed racial lineage. On stage, in her silver futuristic diva costume, Rachel throws off her cape and performs a powerfully seductive vamp that instantly whips the crowd into a nympholeptic frenzy. “We’re gonna get looooooose!” she croons. Until, suddenly she is snatched off the stage and almost stripped of her clothes. Kevin Costner as Frank Farmer is the handsome White former secret service man who is reluctantly assigned to protect her. The plot revolves around the sinister efforts of a stalker who seeks to kill the pop icon, and Farmer is at first reluctant to take the job in order it seems to ‘save Jezebel from herself’; until that is, Rachel seduces him. “You didn’t have to fuck everybody!” [At the party] he tells her at one point, and Farmer realizes that he’s got quite a bit on his hands. Finally, Farmer takes Rachel and her family away from her high profile promiscuous lifestyle on vacation to his father’s house on a lake. It is here that the sinister plot to kill Rachel Marron is finally unraveled. As Nikki attempts to seduce Farmer, she reveals her deep seated envy for her own sister’s success, admitting that she is the one who actually hired a hit man to kill her sister in the first place. Nikki balks at his rejection of her saying: “Why have just one sister, when you can have us both?” In the end, Nikki is killed, and even though she has tried to fire the hit man, he continues the contract as the titillating allure of his promiscuous prey is far too enticing to abandon.

While Jezebel was coming of age neatly packaged and efficiently massaged into the minds of people around the world, her children were gracefully allowed to travel with her. These were the ‘Picaninnys’, images of filthy and unruly nappy-headed Black children. They were usually portrayed with ragged clothes, often half naked and being chased and frequently eaten by alligators and other beasts of the wild. One could easily assume that Jezebel was such a whore that she was an unfit mother as well, and this was the image of the Black woman that would become globalized for more than a century. Picaninnys would become the greatest source of product branding that the world had ever known, and their tales of delinquency and mischief would become the narrative source of children’s stories for generations to come.

In a nation that still remains vastly segregated on a grassroots level, Jezebel, and the occasionally dismissive outburst of ‘Sapphire’ remain the most powerful images that many Americans have ever seen of the Black woman; and it is of no fault of the Black woman herself that these forces have been arrayed against her. Nevertheless, in the Black community, even after the enormous impact of patriarchal Christianity, which often seems to have rendered many African people spiritually mum and culturally suicidal, the Black woman is still revered beyond the cultural lockbox of Euro-centric society. She remains in fact the celebrated ‘rock’ and foundation of the entire Black community, and she is known by many attributes.

She is Eve in the primordial garden; but not just as the source of original sin. She is also variously known as The Grande Inquisitor, facing down the serpent that seems to respond to what she has only been told to believe: “That’s not true. Who told you that? You surly shall not die!” (Genesis 3: 1-5). Yet, even before the chronicle of that enduring exchange, she was Asset (Isis) Queen of the Nile and Mother of Civilization. She is Maat, symbol of justice, righteousness, and spiritual probity, with attributes that are far too numerous to mention. She is the mythical figure of Baset, reckoned in the primordial image of the premiere Cat Woman, who leads the charge in the celebrated unification of the Upper and the Lower lands of Ancient KMT; the first and sadly one of the last great High Civilizations that the world has ever known. She is Queen Hatshepsut, the great pharaoh who fights to restore the cultural order torn apart by greed, and war. She is the Black Madonna with Child, known throughout the world as the legendary symbol of the nurturing sprit of the feminine energy of the Universe. Every Black woman carries the potential of all of these attributes and more. It is for this reason that she is variously mocked, envied, and adored, and at the same time she is so often variously feared as well. She is the torch bearer, like Queen Nzinga leading her people into war, and like Armanita, known as Harriet Tubman, the Great Black Mosses leading her people out of slavery. She is Ida B. Wells and Cynthia McKinney facing down the mobs that seek to lynch her; and speaking Truth to Power in order to tell the nation what it really needs to hear. In the Black community, we know exactly who Michelle Obama is, because we readily recognize all of the natural attributes that she exudes. She is an example of what makes us ‘Proud to be American’, because we have always known that: ‘A Nation Can Rise No Higher than Its Woman!’ This is because it is the woman that is the first teacher of the child.

The elders teach us that: “The first Book of Life was written by a woman ---- ‘Maat’. But, she was only writing down what was being told to her by a man ---- ‘Djehuti’. She was the first Chief Justice, and the Hall of Justice was in the Center of the Sun!” Today, the African American community is increasingly guided by the principles of ‘Sankofa’ (‘Go back and fetch it’), and something we call: ‘I-U-Raysha’, and although I will admit that this crude effort to deliver the most accurate pronunciation of this latent African Mother Principle, does little diligence to its proper spelling, know that this is the governing ‘female’ principle that denotes ‘Healing on a Spiritual Level; brought forth to us by our greatest living cultural alchemist Dr. Marimba Ani, as the actual first principle of the contemporary Reparations Movement. The European world has never really been able to truly synthesize the unique complexity of the African Cultural Worldview; and the Modern World has often been introduced to Black American Femininity solely through the psychopathic lens of Bubba in his backyard.

While he has worked aggressively to paint into the public mind a rather demeaning view of the African Village, where men, women, and children seem to simply gather in a primitive ritual half-naked with the Black women’s breast fully exposed, a few thoughts inverted back of this perceptual reality do come to mind. Notice that these women appear to be in the healthy habit of breast-feeding their children, boosting their natural immunity from disease for the rest of their lives. So too, their breasts and bodies have simply not been ‘sexually objectified’ in their society, and no man you will notice has ever attempted to rape them. This would be completely unthinkable. In the European Cultural Worldview, the female is highly objectified and hyper-sexualized. The European world calls this walk with Creation – ‘His-story’, and by so doing he immediately disses half of his family, half of his aid along the journey. Africans knew nothing of this estranged Cultural Worldview until relatively recent times.

Long before the Democratic primaries were over conservative guru Karl Rove, the architect of the presidency of Bush the Younger and the Neo Cons gathered their focus groups for the purpose of discovering just how to attack Barrack Obama in the general election. It should come of no surprise that right out of the box they are explicit in their intentions to make Michelle Obama what they call “Fair Game”. Perhaps Bubba reasoned that if he could get away with the unprecedented treatment of a Black congresswoman like Cynthia McKinney, even a Black potential First Lady is game as well. Perhaps this is because that even in the year 2008, many people still believe that a Black woman simply cannot be legally raped in America. Why else would Duke University have the audacity to hold a sex party one year after the verdict in that case? If America is to truly emerge into a post racial society, it shall not arrive there without a measure of honest reconciliation with its past, and reconciling a brutal barbaric past appears not likely what many Americans are ready to do.

In ‘Freedomland’ (2006) Julianne Moore plays Brenda Martin, a pale neurotic White single mother who incites racial tensions in a Black New Jersey neighborhood after she accidentally causes the death of her own child, only to immediately claim that he has been abducted. Think Susan Smith in 1994 who claimed that African Americans carjacked her and kidnapped her child. Samuel L. Jackson plays Lorenzo, the Black policeman with relatives and street credits in the Black community that quickly becomes the subject of maddening White rage from the police officers (including Brenda’s brother) in the neighboring White community; now thrown into wanton bloodlust at the thought of a fiendish Black man. The plot races towards a terrifying racial conflagration as the Black community is instantly locked down, until at last Brenda tells Lorenzo the truth. All of her life Brenda it seems has been an outcast in her family, and she appears to truly derive love and comfort working in a daycare center in the Black community. These are the people that she has come to love. Yet, at one point, one of her coworkers tells her: “You, stay away from my child!” Ultimately, she reveals to Lorenzo the love affair that she had with a Black man who was with her the night that her son passed away. Gradually, she seems to fall in love with Lorenzo as he interrogates her, and in the end she admits to him that she told this lie because with all the misery and pain that the Black community has seen, she really just felt that they could deal with her pain as well. Freedomland is a symbol of a community far too often made the political dumping grounds for the nation’s ills.

Bubba In The Backyard by T. S. Aschenge

The politics of race and gender in Campaign 2008

“The struggle for freedom in America is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies and white men’s minds!”

Fredrick Douglass

In director Milos Forman’s 1981 movie adaptation of the E. L. Doctorow classic novel Ragtime, Howard Lee Rawlings plays the suave Coalhouse Walker Jr., a dapper, sophisticated, and well mannered jazz pianist caught driving a fancy car through a notorious Sundown Town; in the middle of the afternoon. It is a violent tragedy set upon a strange dichotomy of race and class in the segregated turn of the century Apart-hate American state. The direction is superb, back of a script that pushes the actors to the emotional depth of their characters. Immediately, the quickening pace of this tragic life and death saga turns upon the queer and bitter hubris claimed by a local white blue collar worker (the fireman), who becomes incensed upon the abrupt encounter of a Black man in such fine clothes driving such a fancy car. His actions make a bold and blatant statement back of the pedagogy of oppression, and the ritual perception of white supremacy and Black racial inferiority; measured during a rude era of psychopathic racist violence. It was an age of pogroms, terrorism, and ritualistic mass murder. It was a time when Blackfolk had come to expect little justice, if any at all. And, it was Bubba’s greatest time in the sun. The fireman’s rage is fueled by his unique sense of entitlement. This was a day and an age that would produce a long and bitter painful series of Red Summer seasons that brought inconceivable misery and death to Black people. Today, this seminal age in American history still lives and breathes unreconciled in the not to far removed subconscious life of this nation. The mad rush of brutish indignities hurled directly upon this man life, along with the senseless murder of the mother of his newborn child, the woman that he loves, in the midst of an anxious white mob, pushes Coalhouse towards revolutionary violence.

Watching as the fireman’s actions instantly alight such a horrible series of atrocities, we are reminded of this same unique sense of entitlement as we witnessed in another character; this time in the movie Rosewood. In this biopic of the very same era, one white man actually becomes terribly upset with the knowledge that a Black man in a Black community nearby actually has a piano in his house, while he of course does not; even though he has absolutely no idea how to play one, nor any desire at all to learn. Both of these narratives speak loud to a shocking era of brutal wholesale terrorism. It was the First Evil Birth of Jim Crow. Behind the Black Codes, the discriminatory ordinances, and Jim Crow laws, Apart-Hate in America existed as a brut social order, codling the ever-present threat of death. Thousands of innocent Black men, women, and children would die a painful senseless death for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Numerous independent Black communities would literally be burned to the ground, and millions of dollars in property would be lost simply due to the arbitrary whim of white accusation. All across the nation, Blackfolk were once again forced upon a woeful Trail of Tears. This was during an era, that was but half a century removed from the Civil War and the First Reconstruction, and many people still ask of those macabre decades of rope and fire, of broken flesh and wonton bloodlust, just how on earth could this have happened?

The answer, long neglected may sound rather complicated some. However, it is actually quite simple. It involves the intergenerational transmission of cultural codes and mores, vigorously and sometimes violently re-enforced in ritual play. Today, it remains an aggressive virus that feeds off of the fragile political ether, while hiding within the easy quicksilver transmission of physic memory. It is that very buoyant part of American life and culture that is kept hostage, as if stolen to a psychological lockbox that buffers the political discourse preventing each generation from truly developing an honest and open discussion of race.

Let me locate for you, the space from which I am speaking. During slavery, a Black man’s desire to make a strike for freedom was often rationalized and even seriously argued in the courts, as some sort of mental disorder or disease. ‘What in the world could be much better than what they have here?’ They would say. After slavery, white men cowardly came to project the almost Jack-the Ripper-like attention that they had once wantonly displayed towards Black women’s bodies, on to the Black male. From this moment on, as the nation was once again on the brink of remaking itself, suddenly ingrained into the substance of American culture, and constantly re-enforced through ritual play, down on through that vicious period in which Coalhouse Walker endeavored to play jazz and raise a family, roughly a century ago, when conservative newspapers like the Atlanta Journal Constitution basically poised as bulletin boards directing the latest surge of white bloodlust running rampant and unchecked; until, as recently as the O.J. Simpson trial and the downfall of Mike Tyson, the specter of a brutish Black male rapist violently on the prowl for the chastity of white woman, has been a lucrative commodity for the American corporate media. It is that part of the conversation on race that has been made mute and unspeakable. It is what keeps us from healing and moving on as a nation. It is like the restrained conversation that you sought to have with your child that ended up only helping her to get her pregnant far too young in her life. Nonetheless, culturally, nation-wide it remains a deep and incessant subconscious utterance woefully stolen from death detritus and surviving through decades of dishonesty and neglect. It remains as if secreted away in the far off basement of honest political discourse. Today, it remains extant in our world as a powerful lingering metaphor. However, truth be told; Black men were never on the prowl for white women. During the days of Jim Crow, thousands of successful deeply stratified self-sustaining independent Black communities existed throughout the United States. More often than not, the media crafted image of a fiendish Black man only served to mask the real true overwhelming desire of Whitefolks to acquire Blackfolk’s land. It is from this painful trough of hidden emotion that sits upon the battered landscape of a shameful aspect of America’s past that much of Barrack Obama’s opposition has fed.


The Black Candidate


"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election between two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interests of the country and people could actually ask themselves who is right on the issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

Bill Clinton


By December of 2007 HRC was still polling an overwhelming majority of Black voters; roughly 57 to 32%. Iowa however would change all of that. Immediately, Barack Obama had passed something akin to the Apollo Ballroom Test, and he was now easily seen by an overwhelming majority of the Black community as more than just a symbolic candidate. Suddenly, his enormous crossover appeal had afforded him ‘viability’ in the eyes of the world, and now the giddiest spotlight was turned directly upon the talented political golden child from Chicago. Although Hillary Clinton’s forged ‘tears for racial fears’ did have some measurable effect in New Hampshire, still an evolving cross-cultural swath of the nation’s electorate young and old would remain forever smitten with the candidate who actually embodied the true nature of change.

After what had become nearly eight miserable years, whence a stolen election, a terrorist attack, and a devastating alienating war abroad had suddenly thrown open the whole nature of what it actually means to be an American, finally there had emerged a candidate who actually manifested the audacity of hope. It was a brand that spoke to the best in all of us. For his opponents though, the playbook had long ago been written and culturally set in stone, and there remained an ironclad reliance upon the lingering perception of Black racial inferiority. This would continue to linger on of course extant within the malignant zeitgeist of an inadequate and ill advised century of protracted concentrated Civil Rights discourse. Thus for them, quite another political narrative remained aggressively at play.

Within the Clinton campaign this would continue to evolve, concurrent with a rather odd and sporadic babble, opting to serendipitously arise from what appeared to be sidelined cadres of the legendary Civil Rights-Integrationalist Talented Tenth Cabal (the New Tenth). Many of them had inevitably thrown in their support to HRC early on. More than half of the Congressional Black Caucus supported her, and many members of this forty year old cabal would now seem to arrogantly interpose their very own estranged cultural worldview into the discourse of the campaign. Perhaps it was because Barrack Obama had not come out of the pedagogy of any of their institutions. Nonetheless, they would seem to act as if seeking to muddy the political waters by childishly tossing out reckless thoughts into the stiff racial ether, using such cleverly concocted tricknology such as: “Well, he’s just not Black enough!” and then, “Oh, he’s just too Black!” ------------- These were comments, thoughts, and ideas that actually hearkens us back to their very own bizarre black skin color-caste pedagogy; the strange and the familiar Brown Paper Bag Test and such. Today, this too remains a recalcitrant pathology whose viral effects have surly evolved. It lives, culturally re-enforced throughout the generations and evidenced now in a plethora of corporate media concocted ‘Leading Blacks’ who often appear to be Black Leaders in blackface alone. They perform right before our eyes like players in some grotesque vaudevillian opera; the cast, for the most part culturally disoriented and culturally suicidal, presenting a strange performance of Al Joelson on the flip side! Curious, isn’t it?

Obviously, one would have to assume that this elite political intelligentsia (the New Tenth) did not even bother to read either of Barack Obama’s celebrated best selling books; The Audacity of Hope (2006), and Dreams From My Father (1995) where he writes: ‘It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela.’ Later on, he fondly recalls the admonitions of his father saying to him: ‘You do not work hard enough, [Barrack]. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!’ In time of course, ironic as it would seem, it would be Barack Obama who would continue to be accused of just not having a “Black agenda”. However, in both of Jessie Jackson’s presidential campaigns (1984, 1988), and in that of Al Sharpton’s (2004) were we not stridently informed: “Just simply being Black and in the presidential race means itself that issues of concern to the Black community shall automatically rise to the surface!” If this is so, then what for them has actually changed in 2008? Why has Barack Obama seemed to raise the cautious ordure of so many of today’s selected, groomed, and often perfectly projected Leading Blacks? The answers may lie not too far from King’s Tomb. Perhaps Memphis was simply no place for him? Doesn’t it all just make you wonder?


The Eloquent Trickster

“In the end of the day, you don’t hire a president to make speeches; you hire a president to solve problems!

HRC

In a rare interview, just days before the primary season had begun in earnest; Tavis Smiley was quick to remind the viewers of Meet the Press that the old Southern Strategy [of racial politics] would not play well as a part of the presidential campaign. On January 26th voters in the South Carolina Primary proved Smiley right. The Bubba politics of Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with that of quite a number of their most anxious surrogates, was resoundingly sat down in South Carolina. Yet, old habits do often die hard and henceforth flying neatly below the radar, yet unfailing in its resolve would be the never-ending effort to paint Barack Obama as “The Black candidate” This is what lies behind the “Electability” argument. Of course, this would rely solely upon the deeply pessimistic hoped for signs of a lingering existence of a still vast and recalcitrant perception of Black racial inferiority. After the Palmetto defeat, now forever conspicuously driving the narrative would be the effort to present the picture of a Black man of very little substance. From Super Tuesday until the Philadelphia Speech on Race (A More Perfect Union), no matter how replete his speeches on the stump, no matter how articulate and comprehensive his language, despite his academic and political credentials, along with two rather well written and well received books, a picture was to be painted into the minds of the American people that he was still simply ----------‘Jive Talk’n!’ He was to be seen in classic Negro caricature, in the stereotypical guise of the Black man ---------- ‘On the Take’; the Eloquent Trickster and the Con Man, like Hollywood’s contemporary version of a loud talking Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy, or Chris Tucker. He talks a good game, but he surly cannot be trusted, and besides, there’s just not much there.

So it was that Bubba would continue to hone his skills finding a new fangled brand of southern comfort in his very own backyard. He was all too well aware that racism in America, is like the deformed child kept hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there, but ‘we really not supposed to talk about it!’ This has left a woeful physic byproduct, betrayed in a rigid social contract uniquely reinforced within the subconscious collective through a stark ritual play. It is the mute state of racial discourse in America. It remains true as well that even for the most righteous mass of the American population, it is a conversation that has been vigorously manufactured, shaped and molded for them. On the other hand, let us understand that racism is not simply the occurrence of a harsh grammatical event, which fractures the protocols of what is considered politically correct. It is not the language itself, but it is a psychopathology back of the human discourse.

Thus far, the boldest racist language during the period of this campaign would not actually come directly from Bill or Hillary Clinton. It would arrive in the words and speeches of Bob Johnson, Pat Buchanan, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neo Nazi Hal Turner (who actually suggested that someone should simply assassinate Barack Obama). And, they would come in the words of an anchor on the Golf Network who casually stated that maybe Tiger Woods should simply be: “taken out back and lynched!” And then, in the words of a Hilary Clinton supporter in Texas who unabashedly stated that: “Barack Obama’s problem is that he is black; ---------- whatever that was supposed to mean. For two weeks the American public was even unwittingly forced to sit as an involuntary focus group for the mere purpose of gauging Obama’s appeal in Muslim garb. All of these instances of xenophobic cynicism were made by people who today portray themselves for the most part, as unapologetically racist. Back of the words and events however, it is the queer psychopathology of human negation that is important here, with its collateral sense of white entitlement. Like the fireman’s hubris simply knowing that Coalhouse exist in his world. It is reflective of both the failure of, and this nation’s unwillingness to truly tackle the issue of race. So too, it is a result of the legendary philanthropic co-opting and foreign occupation of the Black community through the explicit use of agents in blackface, who were never really educated and or groomed to consider but a marginal ‘Tenth’ of their own African Village. It was W.E.B. Dubois who said that …“the purpose of the education of the Talented Tenth was to keep the best amongst us, away from the worst!” It was a philosophy completely antithetical to the African Cultural Worldview. Nonetheless, they showed up about a century ago in the midst of a true human rights dilemma, prepared with a philosophy that was never really constructed to address the whole of the human being. At the turn of the previous century, philanthropic Civil Rights discourse immediately took us backwards, from three-fifths of a human being, to what eventually became less than one-eighteenth! No longer a precious commodity, Black flesh became an easy scapegoat.

Even further, back of the effort to paint Barrack Obama in the pessimistic ritual perception of black racial inferiority, was the shameless yet blatant plea from the carders of American feminism (Gloria Steinem, Geraldine Ferraro, et al, claiming that a white woman must always stand first in the accent of power; and they are not at all afraid to admit it. One can often here the echo of Fredrick Douglass, arguing with the Grimke Sisters, and Susan B. Anthony. Nonetheless, whatever it’s myriad of desperate contortions, the legendary Southern Strategy would still remain the same. “To make a poet black and bid him sing!”



Manufacturing Scandal and Consent

“…Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy …

Peter Dreier, The Huffington Post, May 1, 2008

“To say the news media's coverage of Reverend Wright has been exhaustive is like saying that Us was mildly interested in Brad Pitt's split from Jennifer Aniston. Or, as Chris Rock said recently, "It's like they gave [Wright] his own channel." More accurately, they gave him several channels. His diatribes were on a never-ending loop and the networks unleashed an army of pundits to discuss whether the connection to Wright made Obama inherently unelectable. ……
…..The true hallmark of sensationalized journalism is ginning up controversy to drive sales, and for the mainstream news media Wright was a tailor-made tabloid icon. With newspaper sales at record lows, network news ratings tanking and 24-hour news channels desperate to fill up all 24 hours, Wright's outbursts were the mainstream media's equivalent of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch - a train wreck no one could turn away from. And so they milked it, regardless of the impact on the very race they were supposedly covering objectively…”

Cohen, Us Magizine


By the middle of March, almost overnight this covert effort on the part of the Clinton campagin to paint Barrack Obama in the sterotypical guise of an eloquent trickster of little substance, was suddenly extinguished by his historic, spiritual, and engaging, ground breaking speech on race in America, in response to the aggressive hightec lynching of his former pastor Reverend Jeriamaih Wright, led by Sean Hannity of Fox News. Reverend Jeriamaih Wright emerged from being a cleric with an obsure moderate popularity in a few circles, to an instant household name. From this moment on, no longer could anyone ever again accuse Barack Obama of simply being a man of little substance. Sean Hannity would eventually find himself having to quickly deny and then having to ultimately admit his long association with Neo Natzi Hal Turner; curtesy of the leader of the New Black Panther Party. Little else has been made of this incident. In a manner of hours though, this obscure Black preacher from Chicago was receiving death threats. His congregation was being harrashed and bomb threats were being reported at his church. The story behind this story is the enormous unchecked power of the corporate media to manufacture scandal whenever they choose. This time, they would put a preacher’s life in danger, along with the lives of more than ten thousand of his innocent parishoners. No one seemed to notice.

Nevertheless, by the end of the week two ironic outcomes would emerge. Suddenly, with almost no effort on their part at all, the controversy had actually netted the Clinton campagin their main stragetic goal, and Barrak Obama could no longer avoid his role the pre-eminent “Black canidate”. Yet, poll numbers initially suggested that the controversy did little to affect his overall favorability rating. In fact, it was Clinton’s favorabilty rating that would actually begin to plummet in the polls for a second time at this moment. Since the previous summer her precentange of the Black vote had dipped 36%, and after the Bosinia debacle, her unfavorability rating would never really seem to recover. More than two thirds of the country simply did not trust her. This would suggest that the increasing racial conflicts of the democratic campagin was seen by many to be the result of the continueing prescence of Bubba, engaged in mischief in the backyard. At the same time it was revealed that the Clinton’s were none too professional in paying their bills, and for a moment it actually appeared as if HRC was blamed for the controversy itself and not Reverend Wright. In Febuary, Obama had netted an amazing string of victories. March had rolled in like a lion and moved out like a lamb with Bubba remaining stedfast in his resolve, only to shape-shift and emerge in the guise of a hoard of network commentators, now overtly fronted by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Fox News.


The Angry Black Man


“You can mock certain people and get away with it!”

Laura Inghram on the O’Reilly Factor, April 17, 2008

With a clever slight of hand Bubba had metamorphsised into the newsrooms of self-righteous cardres of the rightwing media, feinging patrotic hubris as if they alone held hegamony on just what is truly racist in our world. With the overwhelming power of their massive tell-a-vision movie making machine the right wing media was instantly sucessful in turning the enourmous contributions of an highly sucessful American patriot into thirty second sound bytes sensationalized into a deranged almost Manson-like traitor out for the blood of the good white people of America; along with quite a few of what had better be smart thinking Blacks and progressives as well. It is the politics of racial fear over and over again. A ritual as old as the brutal aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion (1831). It was a viscious season of blood and retribution, fortelling the future of hooded possies on the prowl throughout the country. However, truth be told, the Klu Klux Klan (1864) was never simply a rag tag scalleywag bunch of poor white trash, who coalesed feeling threatened by Blacks in the competition for labor. Quite to the contrary, this organization has always been a deeply connected and highly evolved secret society; its far flung cadres fully entrenched within the highest echelons of the nation’s media. Something that would surly make Albert Pike rather proud. What better way to marshal the hungry masses for yet another carnival of bloodlust, rope and fire; if only presented today as a virtual reality? These were the hidden sentiments played upon during campagin 2008. As far as we know, not one indiviual member or spectator of any one of those many thousand known and unknown mad white riots, every received a moment of cousciling for their maddness. Is it legitimate to ask, just what kind of children they may have spurn? Despite the widespread concerns of the Black community, no one over the nation’s airways would ever seem to have an oppurtunity to question the continuing pressecene of Mark Furman, Bill Bennet, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, and others famous for their blantant racist statements. They would continue on as ever to be portrayed as genuine American heroes, intellectuals, and well paid unapoligetically racist media consultants. No one would ever hear a politician today asked to disavow the Catholic Church for the most inconcievable revelations of pedophilic criminal behavior. Yet, by all means and at every turn, Reverend Jeremiah Wight must be soundly repudiated and condemed.

Unfortunately, it would become obvious that three factors would bode not too well for this nation’s ability to actually conduct an honest discussion on race. First, race exists today yoked to a psycopathology that is multi-layered in ritual deception. It is an American ritual as old as the first foundational notion that it was even plausable to enslave humanity. Its strident inter-generational transmition has left the conversation naggingly mum. Second, as stated above, the corporate media tell-a-vision industry has an extraordinary un-checked ability to manufacture reality. This continues on with reckless abandon. And third, ripped from the bosom of an African mother so long ago, today Black America exists in the misdt of a monumental class based civil war of its own; born of generations of self-deception and cultural suicide that issued directly from Dubois’ pen. “The [New York] Boulee was formed in order to steal the Black professional away from the Garvey Movement!” With the Black elite once again on the offensive, and working agressively against the greater masses of their own people, as if engaged in a bizzare form of crabs in the barrel in reverse, the nation’s deep dark secret shall remain safe and sound hidden in the bastement coffers of what is today reguarded as polite and civilized political discourse. Words in the public spear are often constructed as nothing more than shrewd ‘tricknology’; code words made to direct, concentrate, and contain public discourse. Language is often used to oppress, by confining the entrance to where one buys into an idea. So it was that Bubba took off his overalls and put on a suit, a tie, and a flag pen. Just like the fireman in Ragtime, James Carville’s seething Good Old Boy image would seem to become a most fitting poster child for the new effort. -------“I said it, I meant it, and it had the right impact!” This was his mantra. With new powerful allies, Bubba would remain in the backyard and continue to have wayward ideas of his own. Together, they would continue to shamelessly mine and exploit the deep racial sensibilities still left dormant from nearly a century ago. Their strategic effort would continue to be emboldened by a classic manual of racist inuendo, while the campagin to make Barrack Obama the ‘Black Canidate ‘ would now deliberately be fronted by the media elite. Their methods were clearly anchored upon an aliance to a sript written decades ago.




The Elite Uppity Negro Has Arrived


“In this particular reality show, they've decided who they want voted off the island next!”

RJ ESKOW, The Huffington Post May 2, 2008


In New Hampshire, watching her once inevitable rise back into the White House suddenly slipping from her grasp, her tears for racial fears brilliantly betrayed upon her face, HRC aptly played the victim; and she won. Who could say that this was not still a deeply powerful image? Yet, by the South Carolina primary, Bubba had grown quite beside himself, and voters there had decided to sit Bubba down. We were reminded that Americans as a whole are indeed generally decent people, and they do truly hunger for a new era of progressive ideals. They have simply tired of the Southern Strategy of old. Their initial efforts were unsuccessful and the Clinton Campaign upon its own was never really able to successfully paint Barrack Obama as the “Black Candidate”. Fortunately for them, they would gradually gain the aid of one of the most virulent and voracious forces in American politics; the right-wing media.

Eventually, the conservative press would completely take over the reigns driving the narrative with the awesome power of their movie making machine. Fox’s tagline is ‘Fair and Balanced’. But, their behavior throughout this campaign would make it plain that this was their code word for ‘Unapologetically Racist’. Make no mistake about it. The creation of the fanatical image of Reverend Jeremiah Wright by Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, et al, was invented in order to immediately link Barrack Obama with the terrifying image of an angry Black man. As stated above, it is an image that is at least as old as the aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion, and we would see its bloody tentacles explicit in the bizarre adolescence of Jim Crow; during those horrible days of rope and fire nearly a century ago. The speech on race (A More Perfect Union) had forced a tactical change in the overall strategy once more, as Barrack’s image as a simple trickster was no longer viable.

Obama’s speech in March was uplifting and engaging. He appeared at times cerebral, as he called out loud for the best within all of us. No other candidate had begged to answer that central nagging question which seems to have burst from out of nowhere nearly eight years ago ‘What does it truly mean to be an American?’ This was inherent in his appeal, and now a new narrative had to be created. Shamelessly, it was curried directly out of the macabre era of Ragtime. The campaign of the Uppity ‘Elite’ Negro began to develop its prominent role hidden behind the odd grin on that fireman’s face; and the violent psychopathic lexicon of mute racial discourse left dormant and unreconciled since that shameful season in American History. Barrack could no longer become a Martin Lawrence character, in the guise of the easy buffoon. This was Coalhouse Walker Jr. The classy Black man too unique to easily characterize, a brilliant tactician apparently making his own choice between slavery and freedom, the creative intelligence in the person of the anomaly; he is a Black man, -----------------------“Something must be wrong with him!” Karl Rove would take over from there.




T. S. Aschenge is an Artist; often called a Rennisaince Man. He is culinary artist, a painter, a freelance writer, and a novelist who lives and works in Atlanta. taschenge@yahoo.com. His blog is called ‘If Neal Street Could Talk!’ www.ifnealstreetcouldtalk.blogspot.com