Quote of the Day

by Dax-Devlon Ross

“Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits. a metaphor for the “outsider.” Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American.

“Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term “nigger”— it made them feel instantly American. But this is tricky magic. Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man’s value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.”

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act 

Obama: Man of the People?

by Dax-Devlon Ross

BY DAVID JACKSON and RAY LONG

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

The day after New Year’s 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

There they began challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, a longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side.

And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.

Fresh from work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.

But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.

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