DAMN! that photograph! .. can't read anymore now so going for a walk in the sunshine for awhile .. isn't it the worst sight! .. to think people used to hunger for it .. some still do, i guess .. and to watch! .. it's sickeningly abhorrent!!! .. have to go out now after just glimpsing it .. i'll read it after recovery .. :)
In Coates' telling, Obama -- himself a gifted thinker on race -- has been rendered mute on the subject through a tacit bargain with white America, forged as the price of admission to the White House: He could become the nation's first black president provided that his blackness was an incidental feature of his identity, and provided that he avoided striking the posture of the angry black man whose image still fills the uneasy imaginations of many white Americans.
"Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House," Coates writes, "but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president."
Coates' essay is primarily concerned with revealing the racist conceptions that are deeply intertwined in the political opposition to Obama. He lays bare the roots of anti-black racism that were a defining feature of American democracy at its inception, and have remained in various guises ever since. His piece makes a convincing case that Obama bears an unfair burden to be "twice as good," while eschewing uncomfortable talk about race. This has constrained his ability to discuss and address racial injustice in the prosecution of drug crimes, incarceration, housing policy and job opportunities, to pick merely the most obvious examples.
"Politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama," Coates asserts. "But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion," yielding "a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition."
In short, Coates is pulling back the curtains on Obama's natural opponents -- white Americans steeped in the notion that the country is inherently white, and attached to white privilege, the sort of people you might find in the Tea Party or challenging Obama's American citizenship. But as I read his piece, I found myself thinking about another group of white Americans that has stuck Obama with an unfair, race-based double standard. Not those who oppose him, but self-identified progressives who once celebrated him with abandon.
For these white Americans, Obama's ascendance was both a sign that their America was a better place than they had previously imagined, enabling an unfamiliar feeling of patriotism that has generally been off-limits to those who decry slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration rates of young African American men, the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the continued stop-and-frisk policies on the streets of New York.
Here was Obama, enabling progressive white people to revel in a landmark in racial enlightenment, one in which the achieving was being done by white Americans as much as black Americans. We white people could feel a little less lousy about our role in both history and present.
But something else was at work, too, in this white celebration of Obama, a mostly positive racial stereotype of black men yet a stereotype nonetheless: Here was an African American politician who would rectify injustice and champion the cause of equality. Obama would stick it to the man.
"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred," Coates writes. "It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
Among some white progressives, Obama was endowed with "broad sympathy" that stuck him with a certain imagined historical responsibility. This black man powerful enough and inspiring enough to take the White House provoked thoughts of militancy and radicalism -- a kind of positive spin on the fearful composite of black rage that Coates describes as resident in white American consciousness.
And when it turned out that Obama was not into playing that role -- he would not be the sort of black president imagined by white guys who congratulate themselves for reading the collected works of Malcolm X., listening to John Coltrane and Jay-Z, getting the inner meaning of Dave Chappelle, and appreciating the films of Spike Lee -- some white progressives turned on him. Not merely for his policies, which were fair game, but for his failure to be the sort of black man they thought they had elected.
I first became aware of this when people I knew -- people with advanced degrees and influential jobs -- began casually tossing around the term "Uncle Tom," to describe Obama, as we decried his bank friendly economic policies and his seemingly naïve efforts to forge consensus with the Republicans.
One might have said that Obama was a shill for high finance, a charge that could be applied to any politician regardless of race. One might have questioned Obama's manhood, using some metaphor of weakness, which would have been unfortunate, but at least applicable to half the population. But, no, he was an Uncle Tom, a metaphor that involved calling the president a house slave.
Coates demonstrates how Obama bears the double standard of having to be more civil than white politicians while avoiding tripping the alarms of white Americans not fully at peace with the idea of a black man living down the street, let alone at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In this crowd, Obama gets to be president so long as he manages to be not so black.
But these white progressives I have in mind add another unfortunate layer of unfairness. They are annoyed with Obama not merely because of his policy choices, but because, in their view, he isn't black enough -- or at least, not black in the sort of in your face way they had hoped for.
That's a lot of stuff for any human being to have to take on in the course of any job, let alone a job as demanding as the presidency.
iconic alright .. yup, the man and the woman even smiling .. evil which unfortunately we must accept exists still today .. sadly, we see this same kind of hate born of ignorance and stupidity on iHub boards even now ..
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit Meaning
How deep is your love for this song? Go deeper.
The scene was New York City, 1939. The popular new integrated cabaret club, Café Society, had a hot new performer on stage three nights a week. Her name was Billie Holiday.
The club's founder had heard a powerful new protest song written by Lewis Allan, the pen name of Jewish high school teacher and left-wing activist named Abel Meeropol. The song was "Strange Fruit," a haunting critique of lynching and race terrorism in the American South.
With some hesitation, perhaps because of the gravity of the song's content, Billie agreed to close her set with it. As she prepared to sing this final number, service in the club stopped completely and the room went black except for a single spotlight trained on the singer. When she was done, Holiday walked off the stage without even performing an encore, leaving the audience with the strained, gaping and unresolved line, "Here is a strange and bitter crop."
In her autobiography, Holiday later recalled the audience's stunned reaction: "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began clapping nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping."
Though no one at the time knew it, when Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" at Café Society, she was singing America into the beginning of the Civil Rights Era. As New York Post columnist Samuel Grafton wrote, her performance, full of subtle contempt and rage, "reversed the usual relationship between a black entertainer and her white audience: 'I have been entertaining you,' she seem[ed] to say, 'now you just listen to me.' The polite conventions between race and race are gone. It is as if [they] heard what was spoken in the cabins, after the night riders had clattered by." "Strange Fruit" transformed the usual relationship between black performer and white audience, forcing them both to confront the grim realities of racism in America in the pre-Civil Rights Era.
The key players of this story were all drastically affected by racism in America. Billie Holiday was only performing at Café Society at all because she hadn't been able to take the endless racist insults she'd encountered while touring with the popular Artie Shaw band. As poet Amina Barka put it, Holiday's experience with the touring band taught her that "she could play at the clubs but she couldn't sit at the tables." Because the venues were mostly upper-class, "high society" white venues, Holiday wasn't allowed into the front of the house. Author David Margolick observed that she even had to enter through the back door to get into the Hotel Lincoln—a place named after, of all people, Abraham Lincoln. It has been suggested that the last straw, with the Artie Shaw band, came when Holiday had to take a freight elevator up to the stage because she was not allowed to share the normal elevator with the white patrons. Long before she ever reached the stage at Café Society, Billie Holiday understood American racism in her bones.
Then there was Abel Meeropol. Perhaps surprisingly (or perhaps not), the writer of "Strange Fruit" was not a Southern black man. He was, instead, a Jewish-American schoolteacher from New York City. Meeropol was a representative a long tradition in America of left-wing Jewish political activism; perhaps inspired by their own experience of enduring centuries of anti-Semitic violence and discrimination, Jews in the early played a disproportionately large role in early twentieth-century American social reform movements—especially fighting against racism. Meeropol was inspired to write "Strange Fruit" after seeing a shocking photograph of a lynching in a magazine. (Most historians believe the specific image Meeropol saw was this graphic and disturbing photo of the 1930 double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana.) The picture haunted Meeropol for days, inspiring him to compose "Strange Fruit" as a poem, published in 1937 in both The New York Teacher and in the Marxist journal The New Masses under Meeropol's nom de plume Lewis Allan. (Meeropol was a member of the Communist Party, not uncommon for antiracist activists in the 1930s. Decades later, Meeropol would return to public prominence after adopting the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple of American communists executed after being tried and convicted of espionage against the United States during the 1950s.) "I wrote 'Strange Fruit,'" Meeropol said, "because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it." Fighting racism was central to Meeorpol's belief system; it was perfectly appropriate that he wrote what might be considered the antiracist movement's theme song.
And Café Society was a perfectly appropriate venue for the song's debut. The club, which opened in December of 1938, made a name for itself by offering a kind of antiracist satire of "high society." Black customers were given the best seats, the waiters greeted patrons while dressed in rags, and signs and slogans like "Café Society: the wrong place for Right people" were posted on the walls. Café Society was a progressive club for progressive people, a place to enjoy good music, good drinks, and good company while striking a blow against racism.
And yet there was a certain racial irony in the story of how "Strange Fruit" made it to the stage. There was a long tradition in American culture—a tradition not necessarily "progressive" in its racial dynamics—of white audiences enjoying forms of "black music" that had been filtered, through the work of a "middleman" (often a Jewish-American songwriter or publisher), to sound more appealing to mainstream white tastes. The dominant musical genre of the 1930s—swing—had morphed out of African-American jazz in exactly this fashion, and an entire New York music-publishing industry (known as Tin Pan Alley) grew out of the practice. Some of the most famous composers of the era—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin—became known for their wildly popular compositions that captured elements of the "black sound" without necessarily challenging white audiences or the Jim Crow racial order of the day. And other, less respectful forms of popular entertainment—most infamously, blackface minstrelsy—bowdlerized the African-American musical tradition into crudely racist stereotypes that mocked and demeaned blacks for the entertainment of whites.
In some ways, the story behind "Strange Fruit" followed the same old plot (not blackface minstrelsy, certainly, but the broader tradition embodied by swing and Tin Pan Alley). The audience at Café Society was mostly white; the music was mostly black; Meeropol was the Jewish "middleman" bringing the two together.
But "Strange Fruit" began to turn the power dynamics of that old relationship upside down. Rather than softening black music for white ears, Meeropol made it harder; there was a militancy and anger in "Strange Fruit" that would have been difficult for a black songwriter in Jim Crow America to produce without fear of violent retribution. Meeropol was still a middleman, but he was a middleman who helped Billie Holiday challenge her audience rather than helping her avoid threatening them. In the words of composer Don Byron, "what this Jewish American is being a middleman for is quite militant. [...] It is the first step away from entertainment and towards something harder edged and true to the negative side of being black in America." Indeed, in the decades since "Strange Fruit," it has become common for black music to incorporate political statements, challenge social norms, and express frustration with the state of race relations.
"Strange Fruit" was an early cry for civil rights—some might even say it was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Record producer Ahmet Ertegun called the song "a declaration of war," and jazz writer Leonard Feather said it was "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." That is true in the popular American consciousness. While other artists had sung about lynching, it was typically done through a veil of euphemism. While the NAACP had put on an art show about lynching in 1936, and ten plays had been written about lynching in the quarter century before "Strange Fruit," none of them proved to be popular enough to stir the consciousness of the American public. Billie Holiday's haunting song, though, broke through.
This is not to say that "Strange Fruit" stood alone. Though it was recorded in 1939, sixteen years before Rosa Parks, it was also recorded seventeen years after the first anti-lynching bill was filibustered by Southern senators. The song was an early cry for civil rights, but one that ultimately rested on an existing anger shared by progressives, blacks, and artists about the state of race in America.
low-class supper-class, low-class scared and bitter whites .. along with the Chinese in the San Francisco 1849-51 gold rush days, the same types hated Australians, too, who in the 1851 census made up two-thirds of the San Francisco population ..
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