When Will Barack Obama answer for the bad behavior of his brethren?
by Guest Contributor Tami, originally published at What Tami Said
That said, it would be nice to see some glimmer of feminism coming out of our presumptive black male candidate. I’d like to know what he thinks of OJ Simpson, for example. Would he, law professor, stand up in front of a black crowd and admit that he thinks OJ got away with murdering a white woman - unlike the countless black males who actually didn’t murder the white woman, but were hanged anyway? In all cases, remember, the woman was actually dead.More importantly, will Obama repudiate the misogynistic undertone in rap music, the tidal wave of bitch and ho vulgarity that does nothing to move young black (and white) women an inch closer to parity with men? Read more…
Wow! Just…wow, Nina Burleigh. In her recent post on Huffington Post, the writer wonders “Is Obama Man Enough to be a Feminist Too?” I wonder if Burleigh realizes how ridiculously race biased it is to ask a candidate to weigh in on O.J. Simpson and decry hip hop simply because he is a black man.
Will Hillary Clinton be taking a stand against Susan Smith, the white woman who murdered her children a year after the Simpson-Goldman murders and blamed their disappearance on a mysterious black man? Should she be expected to? The idea is ludicrous and so is any notion that black people always need to answer for the behavior of people who share their skin color.
Once again during this election cycle, a feminist proves that there is no shelter from racism, not even in supposedly progressive communities.
I don’t need Barack Obama to be the second coming of Andrea Dworkin or a Black Panther. As a black person and a woman, I need to know that, as president, he will move this country closer to equality for all people. That means helping to close the wage gap between women and men, and white women and women of color. It means ensuring committed gay couples have the same rights as committed heterosexual ones. It means ensuring that kids in poor inner-city and rural areas are guaranteed a good education just like rich kids in the suburbs. I’m not arrogant enough to think that I am the only person on earth to face inequality, and I am not entitled enough to think that a president’s work need be all about me. I wish some of my fellow American citizens felt the same way.
Latoya’s Note: I am pissed enough to spit nails at that crappy post. Check out this gem, from the same piece:
The kids recently pulled my junior high school yearbooks off the book shelf. Ellis Junior High, 1974, was the kind of mixed-race, mixed-class public school I don’t think exists anymore. Hard by the crumble-down projects in Elgin, Illinois, it served black and Latino kids on welfare, and lower middle class white kids like me, but was close enough to country club suburbia to draw students who fox-hunted and would soon head off to East Coast prep schools. The black guys came to school with picks in their huge Afros, and joints in their pockets, and we danced with them to Bootsy’s Rubber Band, in parentless, pot-scented, subsidized living rooms.
We never imagined that in our lifetime, we would someday be competing for the spoils of dying-Empire America.
Looking at those yearbooks, I realized I have no idea what happened to any of those young black men. Did they get lucky, draw the affirmative action straw and get into private colleges and law school, get promoted up the EEOC ranks of a multi-national? Or, are they delivering mail, pounding nails, in jail?
Because obviously, black men benefit from an “affirmative action straw” pull and EEOC programs or they are condemned to jail time. Fuck that noise!
(Photo Credit: US News)
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
danbouchard.com » When Will Barack Obama answer for the bad behavior of his brethren? on 27 May 2008 at 11:32 am
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