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DEATH OF THE SCARY BLACK MAN

AMY GOODMAN'S SHOW, Democracy Now!, featured a discussion recently with the Rev. Jesse Jackson that focused on race and the primary elections. Goodman kicked off the sequence with a clip of William Bennett trumpeting the rise of the new Black man via Obama's Iowa victory: "Barack Hussein Obama, a Black man, wins this for the Democrats. I have been watching him. I watched him on Meet the Press ... He never brings race into it. He never plays the race card ... he has taught the Black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson. You don't have to act like Al Sharpton."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You recognize the subtext of this argument: Obama's not a scary Black man. He won't make white people confront racial inequities or deal with issues of privilege or the structural racism that undergirds this country. You get your chocolate without the calories and, perhaps, without the nutrients as well.

Jackson attributes the Iowa victory to the "maturing of America." I can buy into that thinking up to a point. When white Iowans went into those voting booths, they did punch the card for a brother. But was that a calculation that Obama was a safe bet? It takes me back to that scene in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where the Italian, Pino, says of Black celebrities that he really likes, "They're not really Black." In the minds of white voters, is Obama really Black?

Jackson puts Obama's victory into a larger context of political and social struggle. He rightly runs down the battles that were fought in the streets, the courts, the White House and back rooms for at least four decades prior to the Obama run. What's noteworthy is that in every battle Jackson describes the push and pull that Blacks had to engage in with the establishment (read: Democratic Party and its leadership), as opposed to the blatantly racist Jim Crow crowd. It brings up the question: Will Obama, the beneficiary of the struggle, push the party on key issues of race? Will he even attempt to match the courage of Shirley Chisholm, who refused to back down from her demand that the party's platform reflect the needs of all the people? Will he speak up against three-strikes laws, ...