So Far to Go: Post-Racial Pop in the Age of Obama

by Dax-Devlon Ross

(It’s been two years since my last post on this blog. I’m glad to be back! Enjoy!)

So Far to Go:

Post-Racial Pop in the Age of Obama

I.

“[I]n order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.”

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success

My most recently published book, The Nightmare and The Dream, is, in a nutshell, a comparative study of rival African-American ideologies and the icons who embodied them. Obviously, I like to think it’s about so much more than that, but really that’s what it is. Nightmare was the culmination of an idea that I pursued as far as my mind would allow it to go.  I was fascinated by the similar stories of these men’s lives; I still am. Which is why 23 year-old hip-hop sensation Drake (along the range of feelings his crossover success has provoked in people) is so interesting to me. I need to understand why The New York Times has boldly anointed him the “new face of hip hop,” corporate America is ardently pursuing his services and Hollywood is chomping at the bit. I think he’s trying to understand why. I think we are all trying to understand why.

I have a theory: Drake is pop culture’s answer to the Age of Obama.

Hang on.

Hear me out.

Who’d heard of Drake in 2008? I certainly hadn’t and I like to think I stay up on my pop culture. Even when I began to hear his music in 2009 I didn’t pay much attention. He sounded like someone biting Kanye’s style. But, as the Age of Obama has settled in over the last year, he’s stuck. Now he’s considered, for the time being at least, a fixture.

Maybe we should take a step back before we go any further. What exactly does it mean to be living in the Age of Obama anyway? Meaning, does it have a look? A feel? Well, in the nearly two years since the election one controversial term has materialized in the American discourse: post racial. As a society we’ve struggled to come to a consensus about the meaning of the term (let alone its merit), but we seem to agree it has something to do with the idea of Americans transcending their fixation on race as a criterion for assessment of any kind.

That being said, some of the characteristics I would expect to see reflected in a post-racial society are a broader acceptance of and openness to difference, improved cross-racial alliances and an end to discriminatory practices against people on the basis of race.  Anyone who’s seen recent employment, housing, healthcare, education, and incarceration data would agree that we’ve yet to reach these lofty ideals as a society; however that hasn’t stopped the pop-culture industry from spending the last couple of years bulldozing us into the post-racial era. Whether it’s the perceived wave of celebrities adopting black babies, slick ad campaigns bending over backwards to celebrate cross-racial bonding or Hollywood hits glossing over racially sensitive subtexts and storylines (The Blindside and Avatar), we’ve been inundated with post-racial innuendo that more often than not blur the already fuzzy line between race and class. In the end we’re left to sift through the morass and figure out where we really are on our own.

Nightmare’s subtitle is Nas, Jay-Z and the History of Conflict in African-American Culture. As one perceptive reviewer put it, the book’s aim is to position hip hop (both the music and the culture) within a larger historical framework in order to decipher the coded messages it’s trying to tell us about ourselves. In it I argue that Jay-Z remixed the conventional Horatio Alger myth in the ’90s and ’00s. He told us the story of his transformation from the ultimate outsider (drug dealer) to the ultimate insider (mainstream darling/mogul) over and over again and we responded to it, over and over again. Why? Because our belief in that upward mobility hustle is imbedded in our DNA. And then, to his credit, Jay-Z has an uncanny feel for the moment and sense of timing. “Hard Knock Life” told the tale of the hustler’s come up, “Big Pimpin” captured the late ‘90s stock market frenzy, “Heart of the City” was the balm that soothed our post-9/11 angst and “Empire State” signaled the resilience of the great American city.

The book is my way of legitimizing hip hop to myself and anyone else who cares, of saying just because it’s music doesn’t mean it’s just music. I believe, firmly believe, that art tells us who we are,  where we are up to, what we believe, what we care about—all of that. This is art’s most important function, why so much of the most important art goes unnoticed for generations. We don’t want to see ourselves.

Thing is, we can never avoid ourselves, just the parts we don’t want to see. It’s a helluva condition. The artist always looks, though. She can’t afford not to. She stares into her soul and extracts. After spending years  studying his work, my sense is that Jay-Z has remained relevant for almost fifteen years because he’s always looked inside himself and revealed what’s there given, even when that self wasn’t pretty.

II.

The Nightmare and The Dream: Reviews and Endorsements

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 

 To buy on Amazon.com click here

Book Review by Dan Tres Omi

In the last several years, there have been quite a few healthy tomes written about hip hop culture. Unfortunately, a large portion of that bunch tends to place hip hop culture outside of Black culture. Much of what is written about hip hop culture seems to remove it from the context of Black history particularly. Of course they point out how hip hop is a Black and Latino manifestation of an oppressed creativity but they leave it at that. There is no connection made to the Black Arts movement or the Black Freedom Rights struggle of the fifties, sixties, and the seventies. Dax Devlon Ross, a prolific and independent writer, brings it all home in The Nightmare and the Dream.

In one book, Ross summarizes points made in Harold Cruse’s classic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, and Dean E. Robinson’s Black Nationalism in American Politics. What makes The Nightmare… stand out is how Ross connects the dots to Black Nationalism and hip hop culture. Using the Hegelian dialectic, Ross uses Nas and Jay Z as his subjects when discussing the internal conflict in Black America between Black Nationalism and assimilation. Like Robinson, Ross does a careful deconstruction of Black leadership in the United States. He does a wonderful job of explaining DuBois’ double consciousness, but Ross does not stop there.

Jesse, Obama and the Politics of Race Part I

by Dax-Devlon Ross

“So, who do you think’s going to get the nod?”

“I like Edwards but I don’t know if he can win it all. He’s missing something.”

“What about Hillary?”

“She rubs me the wrong the way. There’s something about her I just don’t like.” 

A week ago yesterday I overheard this conversation. It was between two middle-aged white men. The three of us were the only customers in a Manhattan coffee shop I sometimes frequent after work. Even though I was seated directly between them and they therefore had to talk over me, neither of them asked my opinion. Certainly I could’ve interjected, offered my two cents, but I didn’t.. Their frankness, their nonchalance, attracted me more than anything they actually said. I mean, how could these two seemingly intelligent men seriously engage in a conversation about the presidential election without even mentioning the man standing directly between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards? How could they so blatantly and unabashedly disregard a man who’s raised more money than both of these candidates? I was honestly fascinated. By simply not mentioning Barack Obama’s candidacy they indicated so much more about what still plagues our country than anything they could’ve actually uttered. Given the fact that, to date, Obama has raised more than $50 million dollars ($10 million more than Hillary and oodles more than any other candidate from either party) from more than 150,000 donors, and that he and Clinton are running neck and neck in Edwards’s home state of South Carolina, how on earth could these men honestly believe that Edwards has a better shot at winning – at this point at least – than Obama?  And yet they did. As casually as they’d overlooked me sitting between them, they were even more casual in their dismissal of Obama’s candidacy.

The Twilight of the Gods?

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 Jesse Jackson’s rise, Sharpe James’s fall and the end of the black folk hero

According to biographer Marshall Frady, Jesse Jackson’s rise to preeminence following the assassination of Dr. King didn’t just happen. It was set into motion even before King’s death when Jackson attached himself to King and the SCLC while he was still a divinity student. King saw something powerful and troubling in Jackson. He was brilliantly gifted with something magical, some creative magnetism – a vision and the audacity to evoke it – that drew people in. But once he had someone, King and others noted, he sucked them dry with his compulsive need for attention and adulation-patronage. Frady traces Jesse’s obsessive roots to his childhood, repeatedly referring to him as having grown up an “illegitimate child” living under “another man’s roof.” In turn, he attributes Jesse’s clinging to Dr. King, his hanging off his every word, to his search for affirmation from a father figure. In fact, Frady’s biography is very nearly a psychoanalytic study; it certainly isn’t an intimate portrait. At best it’s a story of a man (perhaps not even that) whose ego was so unrelenting in its pursuit of the affirmation it did not receive early on in life that it pushed beyond the boundaries of conventionality, taboo and appropriateness, and in doing so eclipsed the fear and self-doubt that stands in the way of so many of our aspirations. Hence, the duality. Jesse is both folk hero and false prophet; both man of the people and poverty pimp.

Powell Meets with Obama: Let the Speculation Begin

by Dax-Devlon Ross

Before there was Barack Obama there was Colin Powell. With the publication of his autobiography, My American Journey, in 1995, he cemented his status as a national hero of “Olympian” stature. Wherever General Powell traveled, droves of fans came out to support him, and eventually urge him to run for President of the United States. Just as Americans connect with Barack Obama’s mixed heritage today, they connected with Colin Powell’s combination of work ethic and American idealism a little more than a decade ago. In fact, Powell’s popularity was far more widespread among mainstream Americans than Obama’s is even now, which makes the possibility of the two men working together in some capacity should Obama be elected intriguing on many levels.

Rutgers and Racism: A Familiar Refrain

by Dax-Devlon Ross

This isn’t the first time Rutgers basketball has found itself at the center of a racially charged controversy. Just four months prior to C. Vivian Stringer’s arrival on the Piscataway campus in the summer of 1995, the school’s African American student body was doing its best to rekindle the fire of the sixties generation. For weeks the campus became a hot-bed for political activity. Protests. Teach-ins. Fire alarms. Bogus bomb threats. A highway was taken over.

Barack Obama and the Legacy of the Model Negro

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 Before there were “good blacks” there were “model negroes.” And before there were “model negroes” there were Head Negroes In Charge. Though distinguishable, they are each part of a continuum, a tradition, that traces itself back to Frederick Douglass and is fully crystallized in Booker T. Washington. All three strains of the “acceptable” black are in conversation with one another. They borrow each other’s symbolic elements even as they put them to use – and are put to use – in their specific epoch to allay white America’s anxieties. Their emergences and particular characteristics are in large part dependent upon the contours of their counterpart— the “bad black,” the “black separatist” and “uppity nigger.” For example, Bayard Rustin once noted how, following Paul Robeson’s 1949 statement that blacks would not go to war against the Soviet Union because of it racial egalitarianism, the mainstream black leaders of the day – Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Roy Wilkins and Walter White – successfully used Robeson to gain ground on the integration front. Even as they isolated and denounced him, Rustin noted,

[H]is “wild” statement helped to make their demands, by comparison, appear reasonable and even modest; his implied threat of future disorder made the passage of their “responsible, middle-of-the-road” program seem more urgently necessary. (Duberman, 345)

Jesse Gives Obama a Push

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 By DEANNA BELLANDICHICAGO Mar 29, 2007 (AP)— Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said Thursday he’s backing Democrat Barack Obama in his presidential bid, giving his support to a new generation of black politicians. “He has my vote,” the Rev. Jackson told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

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