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Why White America Perhaps Fears
Michelle More Than Barack
Excerpts from a “Jack & Jill politics” newsletter
[A]s hard as it
is to accept a black president, it’s even harder to
accept a black first lady. First Lady has always
held a beloved sentimental mother/wife of the nation
symbolism. Conservatives are not ready to have to
look at this very BLACK woman with her degrees and
her fierceness and see her as the epitome of the
American mother/wife. This will be a first for white
people. They do not want this black woman in
the White House as their first lady. That New
Yorker cartoon was [actually] about Michelle—she
was its focal point . . . look closely . . . she is
the leader, the one starting the “revolution” they
want you to imagine . . .
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, in the course of
covering the Obama candidacy, “He (Barack Obama)
brings none of the ‘bad stuff’, you know?” By “Bad
Stuff,” he meant the legacy of [whites] enslaving
Africans in this country, keeping them as
second-class citizens until 1965, a mere 11 years
before this country celebrated its 200th
anniversary. You know, “the original sin,” or “the
birth defect,” as Condi Rice called it. Barack
escapes this “bad stuff” only because his mother was
white and may have had ancestors involved in the
slave trade; and also because Barack's father was
not African American. He was full blooded African
and therefore Barack had no ancestors enslaved by
America - and so the white guilt factor is missing
when they think of him.
However, no
such luck with Michelle!
Michelle Obama is a direct threat and lightening
bolt against White Superiority. Because, she’s
Black . . . visibly black . . . But it's important
to note, she does not, in any way, shape, or form,
contour to the acceptable Black Pathologies that
enable White Supremacy to sigh with relief. [welfare
mother, fatherless child, druggie, etc.] Michelle
was raised in a neighborhood. In a home. With TWO
parents. No child revolving in and out of jail.
Raised by a Black man who not only provided for his
family, but did so, with a disability. Her mother
had a working class job—secretary—but it was
taken only after she had seen her youngest child
settle into high school.
Michelle Obama’s poise, her confidence, her
aura—that was created by that humble Black man, who
by all accounts, adored her. He told her that she
is worthy, and so, when you have that told to you by
the first man who loves and protects you, you seek
that validation of that in your choice of mate,
you’ll settle f or nothing less, and Michelle
hasn’t.
Michelle Obama, doesn’t fit any of the acceptable
Black pathologies. And when you don’t fit the
acceptable Black pathologies, then you must be
destroyed. Michelle Obama has become the face of the
Black America whose existence is routinely denied by
this country. Think about it.
In one generation, the face of this “Invisible
America” has gone from living on the top floor of a
bungalow, to the possibility of living in The White
House. And yet, Michelle Obama, refuses to say “I’ m
special,” in order to give white America its usual
security blanket [that she is one of the exceptions
rather than the rule]. So what should be done?
Beat her down into submission.
Michelle Obama represents everything we black women
want our daughters to be. When we stand up for her
we stand up for ourselves. No other women in the
world are more neglected and abused as African women
period. Michelle looks like [our] daughters, her
daughters look like us. We love the way Barack looks
at her we adore the way he looks at his daughters.
The Obamas represent the hope that we
can be loved by our men and they will support us in
whatever we do. Little African American girls need a
vision and dream of what it is like to be loved by a
man who looks just like them.
Is America ready for a First Lady who looks like
her? A regular black woman? Not a passable biracial
curly haired girl that they call black, but a
regular black woman from the south side of Chicago?
With dark skin?
Is she going to be the face of the Woman on
the largest pedestal in the country? A
self-confessed “loud-mouth” black woman? If the
Obamas succeed, it turns white supremacy upside
down. And not because a black man is in the White
House; but because a black woman will be there who
didn’t have to come in the back door to lie in bed
with the president.
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The Heart of Whiteness
By Robert Jensen
The first,
and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a
truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have
plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means
that some of what we have is the product of the work of
others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we
may have little or no control individually. No matter how
hard we work or how smart we are, we all know — when we are
honest with ourselves — that we did not get where we are by
merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.
A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what
we have — literally the fear of losing things we own if at
some point the economic, political, and social systems in
which we live become more just and equitable.—Robert
Jensen
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Go,
Tell Michelle
African American Women Write to the New First Lady
Edited
Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram* *
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Responses to Post-Midterm Elections /
Open Note
to President Barack Obama (Jerry W. Ward, Jr.)
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 29 October 2008
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