goodCRIMETHINK

(cross-posted to Jack & Jill Politics)

If the insightful sociological analysis of Bill O’Reilly wasn’t enough to put you on to the idea that we black people are actually people, I’d like to share two stories I found last week which reinforced this theme in two completely independent spheres.

In “Tyler Perry’s Money Machine,” The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote about the box office-topping “Why Did I Get Married?”

In his plays and movies, Perry shows African Americans as they . . . well, I was about to say he shows us as we really are, but that’s not true. Reality is for documentaries; Perry’s characters are unsubtle, his humor is broad, and his plots are soaked with melodrama. Among his big themes are love, fidelity and the importance of family, and his movies usually have religious overtones.

What Perry does is depict black Americans as people relating to other people — not as mere plot devices and not as characters defined solely by how they relate to the white world. The rest of the movie industry would do well to take note.

Thank you so much for saying this! Robinson continues:

In depicting African Americans, mainstream Hollywood still struggles to leave behind the “magic Negro” paradigm — the idea, epitomized by ” Driving Miss Daisy,” that black characters exist solely to teach valuable lessons to white characters. We still don’t get a lot of films in which black characters bestow their moral wisdom on one another. Even in ” The Pursuit of Happyness,” Will Smith’s character was only secondarily a lesson-giver to his son; mostly, his role was to teach and uplift the audience.

There’s nothing wrong with a little inspiration. But African American moviegoers who want to see their own concerns and struggles — their own lives, even if rendered in broad outline — projected at the cineplex still aren’t getting much love from Hollywood.

True dat. We exist for more than the illumination of white America, and we don’t need other people telling us who we are and what our motivations are. This takes me to part two.

In “Clinton-Obama Quandary for Many Black Women,” the New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye did one of the most admirable mainstream media stories about black folks and the Democratic field I have seen. She didn’t stoop to reducing black people’s decision-making process to a struggle over the fake-me-out meme of Obama’s vs. Clinton’s “blackness.” She did actual research, and in the process, discovered key differences in the campaigns as well as the complex considerations black women are weighing in deciding who they will support.

Seelye writes about the importance of South Carolina’s black beauty shops to the campaigns and interviews Clara Vereen:

“I’ve got enough black in me to want somebody black to be our president,” she said in her tiny beauty shop, an extension of her home, after a visit from an Obama organizer. “I would love that, but I want to be real, too.”

Part of being real, said Ms. Vereen, whom everyone calls Miss Clara, is worrying that a black president would not be safe.

“I fear that they just would kill him, that he wouldn’t even have a chance,” she said as she styled a customer’s hair with a curling iron. One way to protect him, she suggested, would be not to vote for him.

Wow. This echoes a column I wrote back in March.

Think about it. America can’t even handle black people in horror movies. We’re still the first to die.

America doesn’t know how to deal with black club-goers on the night before their weddings. America shoots them 50 times.

America even has trouble with fictional black presidents. On 24, they tried to kill President David Palmer three times. Have you ever seen such murderous determination targeting fictional white presidents? The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet seemed pretty safe. 24 finally did assassinate Palmer—on the fourth attempt, when he wasn’t even president anymore.

And what are folks saying about Hillary?

“We always love Hillary because we love her husband,” Ms. Vereen said. Then she paused. Much of the chitchat in her shop is about whether a woman could or should be president.
“A man is supposed to be the head,” she said. “I feel like the Lord has put man first, and I believe in the Bible.”
<snip>
“Hillary’s husband has a lot of wisdom and knowledge, and that will help her.” This elicited another round of “that’s right, that’s true.”

Thank you Eugene Robinson and Katharine Q. Seelye for treating black folks like the complicated human beings we are.

cross-posted to Jack & Jill PoliticsEvery few years some scientist has to come out and claim that black people are genetically inferior or less intelligent or prone to more sex or some such nonsense.This week’s buffoonish mascot is non other than Dr. James Watson, Nobel Prize winning scientist credited with discovering DNA.The Times of London reports:

Black people ‘less intelligent’ scientist claims

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.

More fierce criticism of the eminent scientist is expected as he embarks on a number of engagements to promote a new book ‘Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science’. Among his first commitments is a speech to a London audience at the Science Museum on Friday. The event is sold out.

Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

Wow. Don’t you love that scientific method? “People who have to deal with black employees”??? Amazing. Dude is clearly a bit old an no stranger to idiocracy. The same article points out his equally ignorant statements about women and homosexuals:

Watson is no stranger to controversy. He has been reported in the past saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.

In addition, he has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos.

He also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

It’s funny, based on my scientific studies, white scientists who try to monopolize credit for one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century then pontificate on affairs well beyond their expertise are genetically pre-disposed to ending up as racist, dirty old men.

(cross-posted to Jack and Jill Politics)

I almost let this story slip through the cracks and hadn’t seen much coverage here in the Afrosphere outside of JP Smith over at black…MYstory, so here goes. Last Thursday, Obama dropped one hell of an op ed in the Union Leader about the Lieberman-Kyl bill labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Titled “Five years after Iraq war vote, we’re still foolishly rattling our sabers” Obama writes:

an amendment passed last month by the Senate could be used by the President as justification to strike Iran under the authority granted to him by the 2002 Iraq war resolution.
<snip>
Why is this so dangerous? The Bush administration could use language like this to justify a continued troop presence in Iraq as long as it perceives a threat from Iran. Even worse, the Bush administration could use the language in Lieberman-Kyl to justify an attack on Iran as a part of the ongoing war in Iraq.

So far so good. Unfortunately, Obama didn’t make the vote himself as he was campaigning in New Hampshire. His absence is essentially a nay, bit Hillary was present and voted hip hop hooray. Check out another excerpt from Obama’s piece:

I strongly differ with Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the only Democratic presidential candidate to support this reckless amendment.
<snip>
Sen. Clinton says she was merely voting for more diplomacy, not war with Iran. If this has a familiar ring, it should. Five years after the original vote for war in Iraq, Sen. Clinton has argued that her vote was not for war — it was for diplomacy, or inspections. But all of us knew what the Senate was debating in 2002. John Edwards has renounced his own vote for the war, and he should be applauded for his candor. After all, we didn’t need to authorize a war in order to have United Nations weapons inspections. No one thought Congress was debating diplomacy. No newspaper headlines ran on Oct. 12, 2002, reading, “Congress authorizes diplomacy.” This was a vote to authorize war, and without that vote, there would have been no war.

Booyah! That’s what I’m talkin’ bout. It’s one thing for Obama to continually draw distinctions with Clinton over the 2002 vote and “focus on the past.” It’s another thing entirely to see that him raising that point is still very relevant today and into the future.

After that 2002 vote, I was utterly disappointed in the Democrats for granting Bush any authority whatsoever. Here was a man who was as incompetent as he was illegitimate, and we hand over the keys to the armed forces in a fit of misguided, so-called patriotism. After what we’ve seen go down in Iraq, I figured we would all refuse such acquiescence in the future. I was wrong. I’m especially annoyed with Clinton whose militarism scares me and who should know better the second time around.

I can’t believe I’m about to invoke Nancy Reagan, but in this case, the Dems should have just said, “No.”