Why My Black Friends Are Ignoring the Occupy Movement: Three Important Lessons

by Dax-Devlon Ross

Faithful Boardwalk Empire viewers are familiar with the story line: violence, corruption and greed in a Prohibition era port city. One of the subconflicts to emerge this season centers around the series’ lone black lead, Chalky White (played by Michael Kenneth Williams) and the show’s centerpiece, the ever duplicitous Nucky Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi). They are, in a sense, business partners. Nucky supplies Chalky with access to liquor and protection; Chalky supplies Nucky with easy access to the black electorate. As season 2 begins, White, the de facto Mayor of black Atlantic City, and his bootlegging associates are ambushed by the KKK. Chalky is effectively put out of business, though not before fatally shooting a Klansman, which in turn incites a mob of angry whites to seek revenge. In order to protect his associate and/or his interests, Nucky is forced to arrange Chalky’s arrest. Once released, Nucky prevails upon an enraged and humiliated Chalky to lay low. Nucky can’t be bothered to explain the finer details to Chalky but nonetheless expects his loyalty and trust. Chalky senses Nucky’s insincerity and resents his paternalism, but restrains himself — for the time being at least — because Nucky is his meal ticket and Nucky has the power to dispose of him at his leisure.

I thought about the Chalky-Nucky dilemma after speaking with three African-American friends  who, on separate occasions, made essentially the same appraisal of Occupy Wall Street: ‘No, thank you. It’s not my fight.’

The Nightmare and The Dream: Reviews and Endorsements

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 

To buy on Amazon click here

“The Nightmare and the Dream charts new ground in analyzing the impact of hip-hop on African-American political culture.  By going beyond a mere inquiry into the dynamics of hip-hop in the post-Civil Right era-a limiting perspective that a majority of contemporary hip-hop works fall prey to-Ross goes back in time to the nineteenth-century and locates a recurring phenomenon that has continued into the twenty-first century.  The Dyad Syndrome of dual conflicting political leaders has plagued black communities from the era of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany to the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.  According to Ross, this syndrome haunts the Weltgeist, or world-spirit, of hip-hop as well, whether we talk of the tensions between Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur, East Coast and West Coast rappers, or artists such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown.  Ross provides a moving narrative that weaves in and out of well-known black figures in addition to musicians and politicians whose lives have been disavowed in historical memory.  Select figures represent archetypes of a “Dream” vision full of the Horatio Alger story in blackface, while others embrace a nihilistic conception of the “Nightmare” reflecting the realities of rampant injustices facing black agents since the founding of the American republic.  So where do we go from here?  With Du Bois’s ideas of double-consciousness and second sight serving a mediating role, Ross details the tensions and ultimate public reconciliation between Jay-Z and Nas as a prime example of how hip-hop, like black politics, can progress forward positively, in solidarity, despite the obstacles.  Ross’s final tale is not a nihilistic one such as that of the mythical Sisyphus, bound forever to repeatedly push rocks up a hill only eventually to fall down.  The Nightmare and the Dream uniquely spells out a radical existential injunction made famous recently by Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Barack Obama: hope can result after we come to terms with the dialectics of partisan conflict.  Dax-Devlon Ross’s brilliant textual achievement is a must read for anyone concerned with the future of hip-hop, African-Americans, and new directions in late modern America as a whole.”

 -Neil Roberts, Williams College

 Co-Editor of the CAS Working Papers Series in Africana Studies

Really Cool Obama Site

by Dax-Devlon Ross

I was up late restless and unable to sleep when I stumbled on this really cool, really edgy site created by an artist by the name of CRO. It’s called Go Tell Mama I’m For Obama. The artist is taking a unique look at the campaign and using his talent to raise awareness about a candidate he believes in. Below is just one of the many posters he creates and distributes himself. Check it out!

HNIC

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.

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.

Obama: The Media’s New All-Purpose, All-Terrain Whipping Boy?

by Dax-Devlon Ross

A week ago Senator Obama was criticized by the liberal press for not being aggressive enough in his health care plan. Articles and editorials in the New York Times, The New Republic and The American Spectator (see Searching for Obama for more) all openly opined that his plan reflected his character, that his failure to issue a health care mandate mirrored his caution or lack of audacity as a leader. On Wednesday, however, the tune the mainstream press seemed to be singing after Obama’s speech in Hampton, VA was far different. According to its reports on the speech, Obama was anything but cautious Witness just a few of the more insidious headlines:

 

Obama: Bush Has Neglected Looming ‘Riot’ Among

BlacksObama: Black unrest brewing

Obama warns of black ‘quiet riot’  

“Quiet Riot” Brews Among Blacks, Obama Says

Aside from the fact that these headlines are deliberately incendiary and misleading (more on that below), they all seem to link Obama with the legacy of the “race riot” without acknowledging  how deeply this image contrasts and conflicts with the “cautious” Obama who only a week ago couldn’t gather the nerve to unveil a truly “universal” health care plan. In political circles this is called “cherry picking” or selectively using facts to buttress a belief one already has while passing it off as “objective” information. In Obama’s case that means he’s not audacious enough one week and a week later (by way of implication at least) he’s prophesizing a race riot.

 

As my good friends over at Mirror on America have pointed out, this was the speech many of those who are still on the fence about Obama have been waiting to hear. It was the one that went beyond rhetoric and the political vacuity and spoke directly to the community that wants to believe in Obama but has too often been lied to and left with little more than the bitter taste of the latest politician’s pixie dust in their mouths.

 

The beginning of his speech is about a baby born during the L.A. Riots, that had been shot – in the womb, but miraculously, wasn’t seriously hurt, and the only marker of it would be a permanent scar to the arm.In this speech, Obama talks about: 

 

 1. SUPPORTING parents with young children
2. A nurse/parent program for low-income mothers to give them pre-natal health care that too many lack
3. Creating a Youth Service Corps
4. Supporting EX-Offenders with a ‘ Second Chance Act’
5. A Prison-to-work program
6. Investing in transitional jobs to help the homeless and disaffected veterans
7. Investing in transportation to help the low income bridge the ‘transportation gap’ that too many poor workers have, with regards to getting to the jobs outside of urban areas
8. Helping minority owned business
9. Affordable health care

Simply put, it was THE speech that many of Obama’s Black critics have been waiting for from him. For all those who have been asking, ‘What about an Urban agenda?’ 

The disturbing outcome of the speech in the national press, one almost solely mediated by Bob Lewis’s AP story which most of the mainstream press picked up and ran rather than send their own reporters to cover the speech (because, I imagine it was only being given to 8,000 black folks), was that all of these issues were either missed entirely or glossed over in favor of the divisive, fear-mongering “quiet riot” headline and its attendant distortions.

 

 

Here is how Lewis opened his story about the speech in his AP article circulated around the country:

 

 HAMPTON, Va. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago. 

Now, here is what Obama actually said:

Many of the folks in this room know just where they were when the riot in Los Angeles started and tragedy struck the corner of Florence and Normandy. And most of the ministers here know that those riots didn’t erupt over night; there had been a “quiet riot” building up in Los Angeles and across this country for years.If you had gone to any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton — you would have found the same young men and women without hope, without miracles, and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge — the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities.

Those “quiet riots” that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better. You tell yourself, my school will always be second rate. You tell yourself, there will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. You tell yourself, I will never be able to afford a place that I can be proud of and call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, “Not guilty” — or a hurricane hits New Orleans — and that despair is revealed for the world to see.

At no point in Obama’s speech does he suggest a riot is threatening to erupt. What he suggests is that the spirit of hopelessness that spawned the riots and was revealed via Katrina have yet to be resolved. Which, in turn, leads into his Urban Agenda, chief among which is solving some of the debilitating and grossly under-acknowledged ailments plaguing urban communities.   Now, here are some of the headlines and opening paragraphs from local papers that actually bothered to send reporters to cover the speech.  

Obama Talks of “Quiet Riots”

By ANGELA FOREST

Daily Press—Hampton, Va Using the 1992 Los Angeles riots and hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as his backdrop, Obama talked about the “quiet riots” of frustration and despair felt by millions of Americans who lacked access to decent housing, quality schools, good health care and jobs. “This administration was colorblind in its incompetence,” Obama said, referring to the Bush administration’s handling of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He said the hurricane exposed poverty that had been there for generations.  

Obama warns of ‘quiet riots’ across America: 

By TYLER WHITLEY

(Richmond) TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER HAMPTON — Literally preaching to the choir, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke to a conference of ministers and choir directors yesterday of the despair that engulfs impoverished blacks.Recalling the riots that broke out in Los Angeles 15 years ago when Rodney King was beaten by white police officers, Obama said “quiet riots” are occurring daily across America.

In Hampton, Obama addresses war, poverty and black tensions

By STEVEN G. VEGH

The Virginian-Pilot

HAMPTON—The sense of hopelessness that fueled the 1992 Los Angeles riots still exists in a daily “quiet riot” of poverty around the nation, Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday.“It does describe the reality of many communities around this country,” Obama said at the Hampton University Convocation Center. “When the sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates, despair takes hold.”

All of these articles are decidedly less inflammatory (if at all) than Lewis’s AP story, which because it reaches 1,700 print/online outlets (not to mention 5,000 radio and television outlets), has a far wider reach and broader effect. This is exactly what makes the AP such a dangerous tool. While each news outlet can choose to alter the headline slightly and move bits and pieces of the story around, they ultimately run the same, in this case race-baiting, story. A service like the AP literally encourages lazy reporting, which inevitably means those who have less access to the media in the first place but who have a better more authentic grasp of the facts are shut up, out and down. Bob Lewis and the AP were so interested in creating a sexy headline that they missed the point and in the process made Obama’s speech seem far more outrageous than it was. Meanwhile the local reporters who actually took the time to attend the speech and seemed far less interested in exciting the reading public with provocative, eye-catching (not to mention career-enhancing) jive than Lewis got no real opportunity to counterbalance the tide of disingenuous blather.

To read the entire speech click here

Searching for Obama: Connecting the Dots between the Man and His (Health Care) Plan

by Dax-Devlon Ross

Barack Obama’s health care plan has been under heavy scrutiny since it was released this past Tuesday. Journalists, health care gurus and political bloggers alike have all thrown their two cents into the fray, offering a variety of thoughtful observations on the matter. Although there will certainly be more on the horizon, two stood out as I sat down to write this. Jonathon Cohn’s “Barack Obama’s Cautious Health Care Plan” on the The NewRepublic’s website gave short shrift to the “mixed” feelings he has about Obama’s plan. According to Cohn’s reasoning, Edwards’s plan is truly “universal” because it would require all Americans to get insurance by 2012; meanwhile, Obama’s would only require insurance for every child in the same time span and is therefore only aspirational. While glossing over the particulars of the plan, Cohn did a far more meticulous job deciphering what Obama’s failure to issue a “mandate” requiring every American to get insurance tells us “about the candidate who settled upon them.” (italics added). What Cohn ‘uncovered’ was that Obama’s reticence reflects both a policy and political concern on the candidate’s part.   

“Obama doesn’t want to make people buy insurance until, first, he’s sure he’s made it affordable. Otherwise, he fears, some working-class people would be forced to buy insurance when, in fact, doing so would impose real financial hardship.”

Obama and Edwards: Addressing Health Care Disparities

by Dax-Devlon Ross

Lost in the muck and mire of all the talk about “mandates” is the health disparities issue that the health care community has been reluctant, for obvious reasons, to bring to the table. Both the Edwards and Obama campaigns, whose health care plans are being compared at the moment, have sought to address and redress the all-too prevalent problem of access for minorities. As we decide who should win the Democratic nomination, this issue in particular has to be at the forefront of our minds.

“Five, Long Overdue Steps”

by Dax-Devlon Ross

On Tuesday Barack Obama unveiled his health care plan. In doing so, he laid out five steps that will bring down costs and update the system as a whole. Below you will find the excerpt from the speech outlining the five steps his administration would take to carry out that vision.

The Black Man’s Burden?

by Dax-Devlon Ross

The Black Man’s Burden?

A Review of August Wilson’s Radio Golf

 

 

Just five days after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 a riot exploded in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles that left 34 dead. When Dr. King found out about the riot he was en route to a vacation in Puerto Rico. While his staffers advised him to stay away, the news haunted him and he ultimately chose to cut short his trip and accept an invitation to Los Angeles. When he arrived he was devastated by what he saw and heard. The rage. The bitterness. The despair. Residents shouted him down when he spoke of nonviolence. Others, to his surprise, didn’t even know who he was. All of if caught him off-guard, left him bewildered and distraught. What had he been fighting for? What did it matter that these ghetto residents could vote now? How did that change their material conditions? As one of King’s biographers, James H. Cone, put it, “After Watts, Martin concluded that without economic justice, the right to a job or income, talk about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was nothing but a figment of one’s political imagination.”

 

Watts was a turning point in Dr. King’s career. He stepped out of the shadow of his own enormously popular image and became, by some accounts, a radical. His decision to move to a Chicago slum and begin the Poor People’s Campaign the following year, and to begin critiquing both the underpinnings of  capitalism as well as the injustices of the Vietnam War cost him dearly in the way of white liberal and black moderate support. But for King it was the only road he could take. Once he knew, once the glaze of American optimism had been wiped dry by the blunt force of urban decay, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the fight that would eventually cost him his life.

 

Fast forward thirty years to the city of Pittsburgh and a similarly blighted black community called the Hill. It is there, inside a storefront office on the walls of which a portrait of Dr. King rests from the opening scene to the closing curtain, that the final installment of August Wilson’s plays on twentieth century black America takes place; there that the push-pull effects of integration, deindustrialization and gentrification work themselves out one last time before the century draws to a close. Radio Golf is billed as a play centering around an upwardly mobile black couple with political aspirations a la Michele and Barack Obama, but really their relationship only provides the art-imitates-life backdrop to a story that is ultimately about the perils of opportunity, the meaning of success, and, most importantly, the quality and character of man’s conscience.

 

 

Harmond Wilks (Harry Lennix) is a quintessential native son. His father was the city’s most successful black realtor in his day.  After graduating from Cornell, Harmond returned to Pittsburgh to run the family business. As the play opens he and his good friend Roosevelt Hicks (James A. Williams) are preparing to break ground on a multi-million dollar apartment/shopping complex with all of the typical yuppie amenities: Starbucks, Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble. In Harmond’s idealistic estimation the project will revitalize his old neighborhood, just as his run for the city’s top office will invigorate Pittsburgh with  a renewed spirit of hope. Like the generation of new leaders Harmond Wilks bears striking resemblances to – Cory Booker, Adrian Fenty and Barack Obama, in particular – he wants to change the status quo by meaning what he says and saying what means.  But wanting and doing are two separate things. In politics it is all too common for noble aspirations to get lost in the muck of ambition, especially when those around you are singing opportunity’s lullaby. You only get one shot, his wife and campaign manager, Mame (Tonya Pinkins), tells him when she insists he retract certain critical statements from a speech. The most important thing is to get your foot in the door however you can, his buddy Roosevelt maintains when he announces a side deal he’s cut with a white businessman to be the minority face on radio station deal. Even Harmond relies on the “rule of law” to satisfy his own guilty conscience once he discovers that the home his company is tearing down in order to erect the apartment complex belonged to the late Aunt Ester, a recurring symbol in Wilson’s plays who embodies African-American memory reaching back to the beginnings of slavery.

 

As the play deepens and Harmond befriends two of the community’s long-time inhabitants, Sterling (John Earl Jelks) and Elder Joseph (Anthony Chisholm), it becomes increasingly difficult for him to rely on an ends-justify-the-means rationale. His conscience begins to nag at him. He starts to question the purpose and meaning of his political aspirations. Both Sterling and Elder Joseph remind him of those left behind, those who did not have the access and opportunity to leave. The Hill might be Harmond’s pet project, but it is their home, and they won’t just be easily removed for the sake of gentrification.  

For Dr. King, Watts and Chicago illuminated the chasm between the Haves and Have-Nots. Inner city squalor gave King the kind of education that Barack Obama says sparked his own religious conversion a quarter century later. The people they met, the streets they walked—those were the experiences that grounded them. And while Roosevelt Hicks ultimately sees the Hill and its residents as burdens, thorns in his side as he tries to climb the corporate ladder, and Mame Wilks sees the neighborhood as a place to be visited as infrequently as possible, Harmond starts to hear a different call. It is the compassionate cry of the forgotten, and he is challenged to respond, to go beyond himself and the plan that’s been laid out before him by everyone but him in order to discover what he is really about.  It is significant, indeed symbolic, that the office wall once adorned by a poster of Tiger Woods and a Wilks for Mayor placard only preserves the portrait of Dr. King when the final curtain comes down. At the outset we are led to consider Dr. King solely as the dreamer who died so that his progeny could share in America’s milk and honey, but as the play unfolds and Harmond’s principles dare him to break with his path – as did King when he chose to devote himself to the poor and disenfranchised – we begin to see and understand that the portrait’s real and lasting meaning is far deeper than the mere “dream” of an integrated society where blacks have the opportunity to be capitalists on equal footing with whites.

 

An imperfect play that feels dated at certain moments and over written at others, and where the budding husband-wife discord is left unsettlingly unresolved, Radio Golf succeeds in synthesizing and distilling the contemporary dilemma the ambitious, upwardly mobile African-American is faced with. Being successful in mainstream America – having money and prestige – comes at a cost. It could mean betraying or at the very least snubbing the community that nurtured you. It could mean compromising your ideals to the point that you are unrecognizable to yourself. It could mean jeopardizing a happy marriage once husband and wife discover their aims in life aren’t as aligned as they once were. It could mean the end of friendships that you once thought were inviolable. These are the unuttered, unexamined pitfalls of the American dream, snares and snags particularly relevant to the black community where authenticity is so deeply entangled with solidarity, where, at one point we all had nothing but ourselves, and now, quite suddenly it seems, class conflict and intraracial strife, haunt our relationships.

 

Radio Golf is playing at the Cort Theater in New York