"But to mention the double is to suggest shame at the singular. Joyce insists on her varied heritage because she fears and is ashamed of the singular black. I suppose it’s possible that subconsciously I am also a tragic mulatto, torn between pride and shame. In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can’t sign up to them. I’m not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so. As I love to be female and I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father."
Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues”
Check Out My Latest Post for The Black Kids Table
BREAKING NEWS: According to recent reports, President Obama is a bully. He doesn’t play fair. Oh, and he hates America. Or something like that.
So goes the latest attempt by the Romney team to provide a counter-narrative to the one painted by the Obama camp in the aggressive Bain Capital ads being rolled out in swing states this summer.
Read more here at The Black Kids Table:
Romney’s on the Run
Choosing a successful line of attack for a political campaign is a lot like being a doctor: You press until it hurts, then you know where to look. The Obama campaign is pressing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney right where it hurts–hard. His time at Bain Capital.
Read more of my post at theblackkidstable.com
Crazy comparisons butt-hurt Republicans have made to the SCTOUS ruling on Obamacare:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Drones
I hear criticism, faint whispers questioning President Obama’s usage of drones to eradicate undesirables in far, far away lands. Most commonly, the cricitsm stems from the
technological manner in which brown bodies are slain, and its implications for the treasured right of privacy in the states. I hear moral indignation, thundrous cries galvanizing media attention to lambast the states intrusion into private citizens’ lives with flying surveilence camers. But I hear silence, the sound of words unsaid as the United States chronically terrorizes the people in that place you can’t pinpoint on a map.
Unarmed flying machinery is merely the latest tool in a government’s toolbox to exterminate undesirables. It’s quieter. It’s easier. It poses less risk (political or otherwise to its user.) But let us not forget, it is only a means to an end. As we concert our opposition to the use of these drones, our framework needs to be rooted in attaked the end: destroying brown bodies. Opposing drones because you believe they’re unfair? What part of our war upon a nation with a fraction of our economic capital is fair again?
I love Obama, I really do
But I always feel so conflicted as I make this declaration. How do I love this black man who has overseen the escalation of the use of unmanned drones that have destroyed droves of brown bodies? women. children. innocents.
I place no extraordinary burden upon his shoulders, no “brotha, be Titan and hold up the entire mass that is people of color.” See, that shit is asking too much.
But I do ask, of a man who has spent time in: Indonesia, Hawaii, Kenya, New York, D.C. …Chicago, who knows who people of color from all over live, to not wipe out their children. women. innocents.
But I do ask, of this beautiful human being, with a beautiful black family, to stop the decimation of people of color in North Africa. In the Middle East.
I don’t think that’s asking too much at all.
"Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominately white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused to much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself and expression of self-hatred—for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than more evidence of black pathology."
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father.
“What part of that was the bombshell?”
Soledad O’Brien questioned Joel Pollak of Brietbart as to what’s so damn controversial about the video of President Obama speaking at Harvard—introducing the late Derrick Bell.
The Right-Wing is now attempting to dress President Obama up as a race warrior and “radical”—whatever the hell that is. But what’s most infuriating is that in this video, there is a complete retreat from the idea that white supremacy is still the order of the day. That just demonstrates how far away we are from really understanding the way our society operates and marginalizes POC.
(Source: CNN)
