Michel Martin takes the floor and darn well keeps it (CNN Reliable Sources)

The first segment of this Reliable Sources, August 22 episode, has seen considerable play around the ol' blogosphere. (I will take credit or blame as you wish.) Michel Martin simply does not let host Howard Kurtz simplify or whitewash the New York mosque issue or the "Dr. Laura and the N-word" issue. She kicks serious butt all over the whole panel and takes no prisoners. And explains why the Dr. Laura thing has nothing to do with "debate" or the 1st Amendment better than most of us could. We need more of Michel, everywhere.

I'm still getting my fall classes going (students still come first, so there) and I hope this item, even if a repeat, has value for you.

A summer project of sorts: saving racist e-mail

Having spent a previous life in the U.S. military, I had to get pretty good at navigating institutional racism, and figuring out when people were being racist racist, being ignorant of history, or just occasionally pushing my buttons. (The last is actually a type of testing boundaries, of acceptance, of letting you into the club/treehouse; the first two are a type of rejection of you and your identity.)

I'm still in touch with some people I served with, all races, ethnicities, genders, creeds and orientations. I would go to the mat for a few of them to this day, and vice versa. Others, I wouldn't give a Heimlich to if they were choking on a salmonella-infested chicken nugget at the next table.

Anyway, there are a few who can't quite leave the military life behind, and their e-mail proves it. They rarely if ever update you on themselves or their families. They forward a lot of kick-ass photos of tanks, carrier landings, missile firings and such, as well as jokes that may have once evoked a chuckle in the geek's row during a middle-school assembly. All in good fun until they go political, then it gets strange.

There used to be a rule: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and especially Saturdays-- no, sorry, that's an old Woody Allen routine about a moose--

There used to be a rule: Pick on Democrats as weak on defense, suck up to Republicans because they'll always increase the defense budget, no questions asked, and don't acknowledge third parties at all unless fronted by verified ex-military guys like Ross Perot. Be courteous to a Democratic Commander-in-Chief because you honor the office, but that's as far as you have to go. They picked on Carter, even after living with Nixon. They picked on Clinton. So it's no surprise that since January 2009, ex-military folks whose bell-curved lives peaked when they were on active duty are picking on President Obama.

What has changed is that they can't help but bring non-political factors into the criticism. So the occasional e-mail about our current CINC is colored by thinly veiled remarks and asides, undue emphasis on the Hussein in Barack Hussein Obama, and questions about patriotism and citizenship that never would have arisen in previous Democratic administrations. (To be fair, there was a brief kerfuffle in the early '90s about a young Clinton visiting the Soviet Union as a student, but it was so darned minor as to be a non-issue.)

So this morning I was about to put one of my former colleagues on notice. Did he, a white veteran, forget I was black, or did he just think I was right of center? I wanted to tell him to cut the crap with his mass e-mails, or just not say anything to him and send everything from him to my spam folder. Then I realized that in an election year it would be nice to track what he was sending, to see if it really went over the top and pegged my race-ometer. So I'm not going to call him on it just yet. I'm going to track the mail over the summer and separate the merely patriotic and "support-the-troops" items from the treasonous, seditionist, anti-Presidential items. If it turns out there's a substantial amount of the latter, I may put my students on the case as part of their fall election-tracking. If there's a teachable moment in there I will call it making lemonade out of some quite racist lemons.

Everybody needs a hobby, right?

A gentle reminder for our gentle readers of what month it is

For a host of reasons I forgot to post this yesterday, but there's still plenty of May 2010 left. You may recall Kris Broughton's recent post over at Brown Man Thinking Hard. It was written in response to neo-Confederate shenanigans (too many to list here) from Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and was titled "America Has a Black President Month" Comes Every 30 Days. It said, in part:

This is "America Has A Black President" month.

The next celebration will begin May 1st. The one after that will be June 1st. The one after that...

Keep smiling.

Spiraling in the Orbit of Precious: Films We're Not Watching

Thanks to the Oscar® nominations, there is another round of discussion around the film Precious.

On February 4, critic Ishmael Reed got some play in the New York Times. He had previously discussed his views elsewhere (e.g. in the comments to a post over at NewBlackMan) but the Times has now deemed fit to give his critique wider distribution. This caught the attention of Prometheus 6 (P6), who started a thread about not giving Precious an Oscar.

Although I've previously voiced an opinion about movies of 2009 I probably won't see, including Precious and The Blind Side, I'm pulling some of my own comments from the above P6 thread for possible cross-pollination here. I said in part:

With the movie, there's the work itself, in its intended medium. And then there are the memes emanating from it across several media as to what it means to be "realistic" and "black" at the same time-- becoming and carrying the message much more than the book ever did. To judge the work itself as a work takes more than I have in this phase of my life. I can tackle movies not of this era with all their faults (with a couple of exceptions), but Precious is both too current for that and so obviously not made with me in mind.

This led to what I meant by "not of this era... (with a couple of exceptions)" and I followed with the exceptions, films of the past that I find eminently skippable:

The exceptions right off are Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and what I mean by "tackle" is to accept them as products of their time, study and analyze them, or maybe even refuse to analyze-- to detach just enough to watch them as is. Birth, I've seen it once and might do it again. GWTW, I've never been able to sit through.

A question we didn't get to over at P6 (although we are having a lively exchange about films, Black films, really good films, and really good Black films) is whether we can speak and write intelligently about something we shy away from or won't see. I think this is possible (I think I have a viable example besides controversial films) but I'd like opinions on it.

Now I know why Prometheus 6 reads David Brooks columns

A New Year's Eve party-hat tip to Rikyrah in the Dec. 31 JJP Open Thread.

I should know by now that when a new Shelby Steele op-ed appears in the Wall Street Journal, I should treat it as a low-level crime scene, observe the police tape boundaries and just move along (as in "move along, nothing to see here folks") so I don't act suspicious and get myself pulled aside for questioning.

But there are certain writers who project themselves in a way guaranteed to hit a hot button. Steele can do that with me. As a Hoover Institution fellow, he frequents the same parts of California I do, and that means he resides in a comfortable enough universe to write things such as:

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

Oy vey. He was obviously hibernating over the summer and fall of 2009 when birthers, deathers, and other miscreants "just wanted their America back." I refuse to further engage that exculpatory aspect of his writing until he comes up with something new.

What I found hot-buttonish and new in this piece were several references to the President that reminded me more of G. W. Bush than of Barack Obama.

The first of these was a brief retelling of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which metaphor certainly applied early on in W's first term, with press secretary Ari Fleischer's too-frequent use of the word thoughtful to describe Mr. Bush the Younger. No, them clothes won't wear, I thought at the time and still do. Steele says that Obama's emperor-clothes are a sophistication, not in the sense of complexity but in the (archaic) sense of something misleading or corrupting. He argues that this sophistication is about race.

All emphases added in the blockquotes below.

And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Hm. Let's see. We don't even know where W. was for all his National Guard service, while Obama had published an autobiography (that needed no ghostwriter).

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale.

Waitaminnit-- which previous President started this stimulus package thing anyway?

Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking.

Well, I can give Steele half a mixed metaphor (horse as ship?) here. I'm not sure W.'s cowboyism was rudderless, I just didn't like the direction he was steered in. Overall, though, I am still confused as to which president Steele's describing.

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

All right, if you want to go there, I guess that would differentiate Obama from the previous occupier of the Oval Office.

Steele seems more comfortable-- at least more honest-- as he resurrects one of his own metaphors, that of the bargainer's mask:

He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not—not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

At the end, amid a rare instance of seeming to blame white America for the Obama we've got ("white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness"), I sense an implicit dare to Obama to drop the mask. To which I would say to Steele: You first.