13%, God-dammit!

Debra Dickerson: do you know who you are? I saw you on the Colbert Report the other day and you said the damnedest thing. See, you were there to promote your new book, The End of Blackness, and you must have gotten sidetracked, because you went off on a rant about Barack Obama and how much of a fake Negro he is. You remember that, right, Debra?

Here's what I don't get: your book makes the argument that Afro-centrism is a bad thing because isolationism is self-defeating. No argument from me there. I think the same thing about deaf people, gay people, lefties, and anybody existing outside the corporeal boundaries of myself. Heck, just for fun, let's quote the blurb on your book:

"She fearlessly condemns the black community for defending the actions of O.J. Simpson and Marion Barry, and for scorning "Uncle Tom" figures like Julian Abele, a black architect who designed Duke University in the 1920s despite its whites-only policy preventing him from ever visiting the campus. "The great architect never got to see his creation, but those for whom he left it in trust-knowledge seekers of all races and nationalities-do. Thank God he was an Uncle Tom."

Now, for a counterpoint, let's look at part of the Washington Post review:

"Dickerson's entire argument -- that blacks need to let go of old notions of black identity and the forms of identity politics and racial grievance at their core -- is subverted early in the book by a surprising chapter on "white intransigence" in which she presents a litany of complaints against whites. Here she lumps all whites together -- just the thing she opposes in the case of blacks -- and casts them as still in denial about the nation's racial crimes. Taking the occasional bigoted remark -- the kind usually vilified and exposed in the press today -- as indicative of late-20th-century white opinion, she undermines her own argument in the previous chapter that the civil rights movement brought revolutionary change. After urging blacks to forsake old patterns of complaint and redress for a newly courageous civic participation, dedication to the common good and individual flourishing, she invokes the usual culprit -- white supremacy -- as if it were an unmitigated and eternal force. Earlier faulting blacks for wrongly feeling excluded from America, she later says that blacks "find themselves defined out of America." Well, which is it?

"Other parts of the book are equally baffling. One page has her praising the ways in which black women "are beginning to free themselves," for example through intermarriage with whites, and another one finds her condemning whites as "societally short-tempered and rage-filled" and steeped in denial. On one page she says that whites who have children with blacks define their children as biracial or multiracial instead of black because they see "blackness as always and only something less than," while on another she seems to celebrate the notion of racial intermixture. She faults black leaders for imposing an orthodoxy of opinion, casting dissenters as Uncle Toms, and elsewhere attacks middle-class blacks' acceptance of the notion of transcending race as a negative sign of their having assimilated to white norms that deny the racial past. She criticizes those who cannot abide blacks who dissent from mainstream views on race but describes whites who criticize "political correctness" as trying to change the subject away from oppression. She summarily lumps the whites who worry about racial balkanization today with opponents of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1866, who saw an organization dedicated to the well-being of former slaves as racially divisive."

I stole all of that shit from Amazon.com. Sue me, fuckers.

Anyway, as the WaPo review sort of kind of gets at, Debra is a confused little lady. She doesn't quite want to let go of that entitlement blanket (as in, she wants to be entitled to SOME kind of racial difference, something that will keep the rest of us from ever being able to speak to her on equal terms about what black people are into, up to, out of), but she also sees that blacks--only 13% of the nation's population--must become more, not less, culturally mainstream.

Now back to Obama. In the midst of this maybe-maybe not argument, Ms. Dickerson made the outrageous claim on Colbert that Barack Obama is not "black" because he did not "live the black experience." Laura B., sometime critic, never-ever reader of this blog, wants to know: did Debra Dickerson read either of Obama's books? I do believe that's in there...

But really it's beside the point. Debra's argument is that Obama cannot really represent blacks in America because he is not a black American. According to her, he's an "African African-American" (and here I thought only white people said "African-American" anymore!), and as such he has no appeal to American blacks and doesn't speak their language. Apparently, when Obama talks, American blacks just hear that wah-wah trumpet thing from Charlie Brown. Or the barking chihuahua noise from Mars Attacks!.

Here's the stern rebuttal for confused Debra Dickerson: it doesn't matter what you think. "Real" blacks are the minority of this country. As you suggest--in your OWN BOOK, which you were plugging WHILE YOU MADE THIS COMMENT ABOUT OBAMA--you suggest that blacks need to see things through the eyes of whites in order to figure out how to better seize power in this country. Got it? Whites are still in charge, blacks need to see things as whites do in order to identify, anticipate, and control developments, and not spend all their time in isolationist cultural fantasyland wishing for pie in the sky.

And oh, by the way, white people think Barack Obama is black.

Could be because his skin is brown; could be because he keeps saying he is; doesn't really matter, Deb. Point is, the man has staked out that ground and you can only hurt him by saying otherwise. There are no great debates over racial issues during presidential campaigns, either, so yes: now is not the time. When IS the right time? I don't know. But just because the Naderites are goddamn morons who insist on repeating their crimes against humanity every four years doesn't mean you can, too. For the last time: white people think Obama is black. He thinks he's black. What the fuck are you arguing about?!

Or, is this another case of the left attacking a viable candidate simply because they dislike uber-successful, somewhat moderate politicians? In 2000, Gore was destroyed not by the right, but by the left, which apparently had a problem with his incredibly successful predecessor and Gore himself, a very stolid, intelligent, and honest man. His wife is a stone-cold cunt, sure; but she's not the president. George Bush is, thank YOU, America's left!

In 2004, Kerry got the royal screw-job from the conservatives, but he was attacked almost as much by his own party. "He's too soft," "he's not defending himself," "he's letting Bush get away with all his lies!" The best of all: "he's not really a liberal, we can tell by his stacks and stacks of money! Why can't we find a Tom Joad to run for president?" All valid sentiments--except maybe the Tom Joad part--but shut up, won't you, until after the election?

Elections are not policy sessions. They are not informational presentations. They are not protest rallies. Elections are yes-or-no votes. You do the educating AFTER you've won, not before. All your pretty lesson-plans look downright stupid, as do you look the ass, on the day after, when the Republicans are in the White House and Congress and they don't want or care to listen to you.

So, Debby: what are you after?