Obama Tapped His Inner Krazy Kat When He Taught Us to Embrace Mutts

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2017-01-25 20:43Z by Steven

Obama Tapped His Inner Krazy Kat When He Taught Us to Embrace Mutts

The Daily Beast
2017-01-18

Michael Tisserand

Michael Tisserand is the author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.

A self-described ‘mutt,’ Obama encouraged us to think about race in ways that erased the color line. But George Herriman, another mutt, and his creation Krazy Kat were there first.

A listing of President Barack Obama’s statements about race might start with his campaign speech “A More Perfect Union,” when the self-described son of a “black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” said that the idea that this nation is greater than its parts is seared into his genetic makeup.

During his presidency itself, there were the elegant “remarks by the president on Trayvon Martin,” when Obama imagined aloud how the slain Martin might have been his son, and the stirring eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, slain during the South Carolina church shooting.

Yet history should not neglect a more offhand comment delivered in late 2008 when the then president-elect was chatting with reporters about the family’s search for a family pet. At the time, the Obamas were considering adopting a dog from an animal shelter, although due to Malia Obama’s allergies they eventually accepted a Portuguese Water Dog from Senator Ted Kennedy

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‘Barry’ or How Barack Obama Learned to Stop Worrying and Love His Blackness

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2016-12-27 01:11Z by Steven

‘Barry’ or How Barack Obama Learned to Stop Worrying and Love His Blackness

The Daily Beast
2016-12-20

Marlow Stern, Senior Entertainment Editor


Netflix

The new Netflix film ‘Barry’ explores young Obama’s days at Columbia University, torn between the world of his rich white girlfriend and the African-American community.

There’s a scene in Dreams From My Father, the memoir of Barack Obama, that illuminates how the future president struggled to feel at home in white America. Obama, 22, has paid a visit to the family estate of his white girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, 25. It’s a beautiful autumn day in Norfolk, Connecticut, and, after traipsing about the foliage-strewn woods, he finds himself in the family library. There, he observes an assemblage of photographs depicting his lover’s grandfather, a wealthy man of great import, posing with presidents, foreign dignitaries, and titans of industry.

“Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany,” wrote Obama. “And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

That push-pull between these two sides of Obama, white and black, is explored in the new film Barry, now streaming on Netflix. Directed by Vikram Gandhi, it dramatizes the years Obama (played by Devon Terrell) spent at Columbia University in 1981 New York City

Read the entire review here.

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Trevor Noah Blasts Ben Carson for Claiming President Obama Was ‘Raised White’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-02-26 20:33Z by Steven

Trevor Noah Blasts Ben Carson for Claiming President Obama Was ‘Raised White’

The Daily Beast
2016-02-25

Matt Wilstein, Entertainment Writer

The Daily Show’ host hits back at the low-in-the-polls neurosurgeon for claiming Obama can’t relate to the ‘experience of black Americans.’

Believe it or not, Ben Carson is still running for president. And this week, he made some news by claiming in an interview that President Obama was “raised white” and therefore can’t identify with the “experience of black Americans.”

Trevor Noah isn’t having it. ”Like a glitched character on a video game, Ben Carson is just off facing the wrong direction,” The Daily Show host said Wednesday night. “Yeah, he is not attacking Trump or the other Republicans, but rather he’s chosen to attack President Obama. And it’s not for his policies and it’s not for his record. It’s for not being black enough.”

“So Ben Carson is saying that because Obama didn’t grow up poor, he didn’t grow up black,” Noah said after playing the clip of Carson’s comments. “That is such a bullshit argument. Being poor isn’t what makes you black.”…

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James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

Posted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2015-09-13 02:40Z by Steven

James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

The Daily Beast
2015-09-10

Tomás Ríos

Bill Bratton said race ‘had nothing at all to do’ with tennis star James Blake’s wrongful collaring and arrest. The numbers tell a different story.

What does a non-white person have to do for the police to leave them alone? The ready answer is that you have to be more famous than former tennis star James Blake.

Blake was leaving his Midtown Manhattan hotel to make corporate appearances at the U.S. Open when five white, plainclothes New York City police officers tackled and handcuffed him on Wednesday.

The real answer, of course, is that not being white means there is no escape from the consequences of not being white.

Among those who buy into the mythic moral righteousness of our police forces, there is a belief that people of color need only be perfect little humans to cancel out the realities of a racist society. Go to college, smile, pull up your pants, don’t smile at white women, and the prescription for transcending race goes on and on.

It seems not even James Blake—who attended Harvard, overcame scoliosis and a broken neck to become a world-class tennis player, and is now a cancer research philanthropist—can be that perfect. The numbers on incarceration make that much clear…

Read the entire article here.

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Are the Tsarnaevs White?

Posted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, Religion, Social Science, United States on 2013-04-24 22:31Z by Steven

Are the Tsarnaevs White?

The Daily Beast
2013-04-24

Peter Beinart, Senior Political Writer and Associate Professor of Journalism
City University of New York

also Editor-in-chief
Open Zion

In a word, yes. But why is this so hard for Americans to grasp? Peter Beinart on our country’s long track record of conflating religion and race.

The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant. “Sorry, David Sirota, Looks Like Boston Bombing Suspects Not White Americans,” snickered a headline in Newsbusters. “Despite the most fervent hopes of some writers over at Salon.com,” added a blogger at Commentary, “the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing are not ‘white Americans’.”

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

So why did conservatives mock Sirota for being wrong? Because in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white…

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The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery on 2013-01-25 03:55Z by Steven

The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’

The Daily Beast
2013-01-24

Eric Herschthal
Columbia University

Barbados provided the blueprint for all future British slave settlements in the American South. Andrea Stuart talks to Eric Herschthal about how her family was entwined in the island’s tormented history.

On the face of it, what happened in the tiny island of Barbados 400 years ago seems irrelevant to Americans today. Even now, the island matters to Americans for perhaps one reason: the weather—it’s a popular tourist getaway. But in her exceptional new book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, Andrea Stuart insists Barbados, with its long history of slavery, matters more than we know.

“I wanted to take slavery out of its niche,” she said. “It’s not a black story, it’s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all.” Slavery and its legacy—race—still shape our world. But more specifically, the creation of Barbados, the British empire’s earliest, most profitable settlement in the New World, provided the blueprint for all its future slave colonies: South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, you name it.

The island’s first settlers, like Stuart’s white ancestor George Ashby, arrived in the early-1600s. Spain was raking in huge profits with their New World colonies, mainly by extracting gold and silver. The British wanted to catch up, but when they arrived in the Caribbean, no precious metals were found. Within a few decades, however, they discovered they could make money by cultivating another precious commodity: sugar, or as it was called by many at the time, “white gold.”

That demanded workers, and the British quickly found a cheap labor source: African slaves. By century’s end, 80 percent of Barbados’s 85,000 inhabitants were Africans, giving rise to a rigid racial hierarchy: a small elite of whites on top; the masses of black workers on bottom; and, somewhere in between, a small caste of illegitimate mixed-race children, born to masters and their preyed-upon female slaves.

Given how small the island was, many of the whites who couldn’t establish a large plantation moved on to other British colonies. Many went to places that would become part of the United States. They replicated the Barbadian plantation model, growing mainly rice and tobacco, and had an outsized impact on early America. In colonies like South Carolina, six of the governors were Barbadians between 1670 and 1730. Other Barbadian émigrés, like George Ashby’s Quaker brother, helped settle Pennsylvania. Barbados was so important to the British colonial system that even George Washington, who only left North America once in his life, made that stop on the island, to help his sick brother recover from an illness…

…The “small people” she chose to focus on are her own descendants: George Ashby; his descendants like the wealthy plantation owner Robert Cooper; and several of Cooper’s slave concubines and their black children. Stuart’s mixed racial heritage helped her paint such a ruthlessly honest portrait of slavery, where she can both admire and revile slave-owners like Cooper—even wonder whether some of the slaves he slept with may have loved him.

“The reality is that most blacks have mixed blood,” she said. “When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture.”…

Read the entire article here.

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‘Searching for Zion’: Emily Raboteau’s Hunt for the Promised Land

Posted in Africa, Articles, Biography, Interviews, Media Archive on 2013-01-15 18:36Z by Steven

‘Searching for Zion’: Emily Raboteau’s Hunt for the Promised Land

The Daily Beast
2013-01-13

Mindy Farabee

A writer set out around the world to find the mythical ‘promised land’ of the African diaspora. Emily Raboteau speaks about the Jewish search for the same, African-American tourism to Ghana, and Barack Obama’s ties to this search.

Mention the notion of Zion, author Emily Raboteau notes, and most people will think almost automatically of Israel. But for citizens of the African diaspora, Zion, with its promised land of abundance and freedom from oppression, has carried profound cultural significance since the days of slavery, when the saga of Hebrew slaves fleeing Egyptian captors served as a galvanizing narrative.

In Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau’s self-described “strange admixture” of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and historical study, the author uses this promised land as a point of departure, lighting out for Israel, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Ghana, and the post-Katrina American South to talk to immigrants and others who have wrestled with displacement.

Her new book likewise stumbles across complications everywhere. In this edited interview below, she talks about family ghosts, the other side of heritage tourism, and the state of Zion today…

Read the entire interview here.

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