LIGHTWORKER? NOPE, THAT'S NOT LOADED LANGUAGE

There's been an interesting thread over at Dykes To Watch Out For regarding assimilation (especially in response to the lesbian/gay marriage shift this week), wimmin's bookstores, and continued consideration of the "Magical Negro" cultural expression as evidenced in white response to the current Presidential campaign.

One reader (Josiah, a Maoist Orange Cake diva), referenced the David Ehrenstein column in the Los Angeles Times in March of 2007, Obama the Magic Negro. Alison Bechdel also drew our attention to Mark Morford's column in SFGate on June 6, Is Obama an enlightened being? (he decides Obama is a "Lightworker" and his essay is a textbook example of Magical Negro thinking).

I wrote a long comment on this thread and have decided to reproduce it here:

'I think Obama and his campaign strategists are very aware of how much white America depends on tokenizing minorities and imbuing them with “special powers” in order to internally overcome their own racist conditioning. It’s a shortcut through the real work of undoing conditioning, in the same way that women are put on pedestals or constantly portrayed as “sexually liberated” in order to sidestep the need to alter male conditioning which forces boys to see females primarily as sex/nurture objects.

'I don’t believe the majority of Obama’s supporters are riding the Magical Negro train. And while he’s aware of it playing a role, he’s not discouraging it, either, because a significant aspect of his success as the “first black candidate” depends on him being non-typical black. He is charismatic but, if you didn’t see his face, you would not recognize his voice or speaking style as American black. He is beautiful but clearly mixed race and more African than American black. These help him make end-runs around the racism that actually dominates our culture.

'Those who view him as redemption for America’s racism, who are subconsciously assigning him the Magical Negro role, are fairly easy to spot. They fawn on him — adulation is our culture’s way of finding/reinforcing our level in the power hierarchy, and has no relationship to reality, especially to the person being fawned over. (Right, Alison?) They are swept away by his speaking and presence, instead of simply being impressed or, god forbid, noticing his mistakes. They believe he has mystical leadership attributes — mystical because when you ask them for specifics, they fall back on “But just LISTEN to him!” (He’s a junior senator who has big gaps in his experience, folks.) The adulation slops over to his wife and children, again not grounded in firm reality. They take any criticism of him as a personal attack, assume it comes from racism (a little projection going on there), and simply cannot hear it without vicious reprisal. And — they hate Hillary, because she dared to present an alternative. Because they are not dealing with their own buried racism (the REAL deal, not the groovy I-can-vote-for-a-black-guy version), they have also not dealt with their sexism (big surprise) and their method/rhetoric used to assault Hillary reveals this in glaring fashion.

'These, in other words, are the Obamabots. They will not get him elected and, in fact, have hurt his cause. The rest of us who intend to vote for him are sick of their adolescent antics and ready for increasing substance in this campaign.

'I don’t expect Obama to make serious inroads in our national racism. I don’t think that is his intent, for one thing. He will have a huge impact on the self-perception of blacks, of course, especially children, and that’s extremely important. I’m counting on him to do what he HAS stated as his intent: To extricate us from a megalomaniacal war; to restore Constitutional balance to our government; to address health care reform (though his plan will not solve it); and to slow, if not stop, our slide into becoming a masculinity-worshiping police state.

'I also have my fingers crossed that when it comes time to appoint the next Supreme Court justice, his advisers will once again keep him from making the error he almost made in supporting John Roberts. The make-up of SCOTUS will affect our liberty for decades to come.

'He will be attacked constantly by the Right, and if the November election does not also bring into office a significant number of Congressional Democrats with eggs of steel, he will be hobbled from making substantial legislative change. Once he falls from the pedestal (which is the fate of all charismatic politicians), the Obamabots will be the first to turn on him.

'I say all this because I watched progressives in 1992 (not radicals, but those left of center) cream in their drawers about Bill Clinton, his gift for speech-making, his good looks, his admirable family, his constant invocation of hope. I was at a neighborhood party the night he received the nomination and people were sobbing because he was going to lead us to the Promised Land. I looked around me in disbelief then, too. He was at best a moderate — and, by all concrete standards, he was more liberal than Obama (despite the right-wing smears, Obama is less liberal than most of Congress). He was an enormously popular President and did a great deal of national good. But all we hear now is the right-wing stereotype of Bill Clinton.

'His fall from grace resulted in impeachment. Obama’s fall will be more severe, because racism will come to the surface and punish him for not just failure, but failing while black.

'The road to undoing racism will follow other paths. It’s simply more complicated than that to undo millenia of lies reinforced by every single institution we have.'

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ENOUGH ALREADY

(Image by Sol Steinberg)

Here's the short version: Judgment errors on the part of Democratic candidates, which are inevitable and frequent no matter how much you worship your boy/girl, do not give other Democrats permission to attack their character and smear entire groups of people in retaliation.

Geraldine Ferraro's remarks are racist. From the trail that's being unearthed, she has a history of making such comments and believing in them. More on that below. If she's a member of a campaign effort, then when her comment becomes public, she needs to be asked to apologize and step down from her association, and the head of that campaign needs to state in unequivocal terms what was wrong about the statements and that their campaign will not tolerate such belief. This is the decent thing to do.


Do campaigns follow this ethic? Never if they are Republicans. Not nearly enough if they are Democrats. Hillary Clinton's failure to step up is a major blow to her credibility, and it's good that this is being discussed. What's more crucial is an examination of the flawed thinking behind the comment, and I appreciate bloggers who are taking the time to do this. I really don't appreciate those with CDS who are jumping on it as chance to call her everything but the Jane Fonda word -- in the guise of "analysis".

Those political bloggers stupid enough to have revealed their biases this early on in a Presidential race have lost my interest and patience. You really did not have to come out for a candidate in order to do your job. Daily Kos has become a joke of let's-find-out-something-else-wrong-with-Hillary posting. With that level of favoritism, I don't believe they'll report as honestly and accurately when Barack fucks up bigtime, as he most assuredly will -- he's not that good, folks. He's earned our respect and definitely our vote, but he's not a shining path to manna and honey.

And, referring to the ethic above: He said nothing about Samantha Powers labelling Hillary a monster, and has not distanced his campaign from those remarks, either. Where's your outcry about that?

One good thing about the tensions of this unique Presidential season is that it affords the opportunity, for those intelligent enough to make use of it, to discuss in detail how racism and sexism function in our culture, distinctly from one another, not in comparison but as two different facets of oppression which serve to keep woman-hating and white supremacy the American norm. Those who follow only one line of the discussion are contributing to the game which keeps us all at one another's throats. I won't read you any more until you clean your shit up.

Now, some racism 101: Let's start with what she actually said on the John Gibson show on February 26:

"Ferraro: When I see John Lewis ... a civil rights leader, why in God's name did he change his vote from Hillary to Barack Obama. I'll tell you why, because he faces -- he's not going to lose a Democratic primary in his district in two years, but he sure as hell will face one if he sticks it to Barack Obama when he has a greater majority of blacks in his district ... I'm so disappointed in him I could die.

"I look at Rosa DeLauro up in Connecticut. She represents New Haven. Tell me -- I don't care what she says -- tell me why she's endorsing Barack Obama ... and then came to his defense on an issue like choice where he voted six times maybe, when he voted present -- I'm like a lunatic about this stuff ...

"If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position?"

What I read from this are several messages:
(1) Black people stick together behind black candidates, and if you cross them, you'll lose their vote.
(2) Why would a woman endorse a candidate who's not voted reliably on a key women's health issue, especially when a woman candidate who has voted reliably is available? It must be racial ganging together.
(3) The people who are supporting Obama are doing so more because he is black than because of the issues, but that "plus" would be eliminated if he were a woman because sexism trumps racism.

So, what I could do with this is call Ferraro names, impugn her generation/feminism/ethnicity/class, or use another several male-conditioning-accepted tricks to conceal the fact that I have feelings about discovering someone who's been a pioneer and has power being this flawed. At least in the above excerpt, Ferraro admitted her feelings, twice. But in the blogging world, thinking of a dozen ways to talk trash about others is never identified as unexpressed and inappropriate anger/hurt/fear. Because guys, you know, don't have feelings in the way of their ability to see and think. It's that Penis Protection Factor(™).

(See, I just did what the bloggers are doing. Doesn't make you especially want to hear more, does it? Not when it's focused on somebody other than the socially-acceptable target of women. Or fat people. Hostility is something you are going to have to GIVE UP for the revolution, or else g*d will leave you behind in the desert. You want Obama to lead you into paradise, but paradise doesn't want your passive-aggressive ass.)

Instead, I'll address the fallacies, one by one.

(1) 'Black folks/people of cullah are in secret collusion against the white masters in the big house.' This paranoia is as old as slavery. The truth is, if oppressed groups WERE able to act in unity and with shared intent, slavery would have ended the first time blacks outnumbered whites in any given county, and there would be 25 female Senators, a list of 22 past female Presidents, etc. This is not just paranoia, it's projection. Reality shows that it is WHITE people who act in racial collusion, who make choices more on the basis of gender and race than on issues or character, and who enforce the status quo by reprisal.

To give you a different analogy, the Christian Right floated the balloon of a "homosexual agenda", some sort of concerted plan to take over public schools, city councils, state legislatures, etc. Clearly none of them had ever attended any kind of queer meeting, to believe we could agree on even the name of such a movement. The folks who DID have an "agenda", a "seekwet pwan" (to quote C.J. Craig) to take over, were of course the folks making the accusation.

Here's a nearly infallible rule of thumb when dealing with those who are letting their emotions (particularly fear) run their brain: (a) They will lie, because they are rehearsing the lies imprinted on them too early to resist the conditioning, and (b) they will be convinced you are doing or about to do whatever it is they are, in fact, doing.

(2) Following up on #1, SOME people actually can sort through issues instead of being entirely swayed by identity politics. This is not to say identity politics are bad, or should be ignored -- that's as dismissive as saying we are past racism, can't we just all be friends? But there does exist the ability to hold several somewhat conflicting ideas in one's head at the same time, not try to figure out which is "the point" and instead create a synthesized view which takes into account the failings of another even as you support them. Women are raised to know how to do this. We are told from the moment we can walk and talk that we are supposed to grow up and create marriages/families with someone from a group whose conditioned ability to process emotion, nurture, maintain intimate connection regardless of sexual gratification, and maintain a household is far inferior to ours. We have to make allowances and value others for what they can bring to the table or else we'll be alone (or happily lesbian).

You know who else gets that kind of upbringing? People of color. They know who we are, as white people. They're around us all the fucking time, we're not fooling anybody. But if they don't learn how to get past our bullshit and deal with us, most of time, at face value, they wind up getting locked away. It's how groups who are target for oppression cope, and teach their children to cope. If you're in the non-target group, you will not have the same ability.

(And, I'm sorry to tell you, fans of alt rock, computer games and Battlestar Galactica do not actually constitute victimized subcultures. You think you know what it's like to be outside the box of normal, but unless you are colored, female, crippled and/or raised poor in this country, you do not.)

Lastly -- Barack Obama has been a real prick on the subject of lesbian/gay/bi/trans issues. Nevertheless, he is ardently supported by members of that community. Likewise, DOMA was a kick in the ovaries to us, but we're also behind Hillary Clinton in massive numbers. What does that make us, martyrs? Or just able to see a bigger picture?

(3) This point is more complicated, because Ferraro comes closest to naming something that I think does exist: Tokenism and belief in the Magical Negro. She comes close, but that is not what she really means -- we can tell because (a) other of her comments reveal she's not exercising rational thinking on the topic of race and (b) the fact that some white people (especially white middle-to-upper class men) engage in tokenism does not apply to the example of Barack Obama's success.

Tokens are advanced because they will not question the status quo and because they are sure to be incompetent. Think Alberto Gonzales or Clarence Thomas. They are popular in non-target groups because those groups fail to comprehend the complicated reality of racism (or whatever oppression is being questioned) and believe having a connection to someone in the target group somehow negates the possibility that they are racist.

But, overwhelmingly, tokens are not elected to office. They are appointed or otherwise put into position by those who hold the real power. Certainly they do not have Obama's record. This one is a no-brainer to prove.

Part of the efficacy of oppression is to separate (in an institutional fashion) those in target groups who would otherwise create alliance and outnumber the non-target group in power. This is done through systematic conditioning, and clearly Ferraro is suffering from its unhealed effects. There is simply no logical way to compare racism with sexism, or sexism with disabled oppression, or disabled oppression with the ownership of children, or the ownership of children with classism. There is no "primary oppression", there is no keystone whose removal will bring down the edifice to everyone's benefit: We have to address all of the lies simultaneously, as a unified force. As Paul Wellstone so eloquently put it, "Everyone does better when EVERYONE does better."

When confronted with the lies, the non-target system will at first deny they are lies. They will then say the lies only apply to the "bad" members of the target group. They will then try to get the various target groups fighting with each other about which one has it worse. We're at the third stage right now. However you engage in their distraction tactic -- either by comparing oppressions, or by venting your self-righteous vitriole on some fucking woman who dares to compare herself to you -- is a waste. Name the lie, ask for an ethical response, notice what does or does not occur, and move on.

One of the commenters at my post on Harriet Tubman states she read that the narcoleptic condition Harriet suffered from as a result of a beating as a child made her fall asleep, at times, when she was leading a group of fleeing slaves toward freedom. When that occurred, her little band would gather around her protectively and stand guard until she woke up. She obviously had a terrible disability, but that didn't keep her from being the route to another territory.

Think about that as things unfold.

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REDEMPTION CAFE AU LAIT

(Image from Stella Marrs)

Pete Seeger as a teenager toured the American South with his father, a musicologist. Charles Seeger's original intention was to bring classical and "advanced" music to the backwaters of the U.S. What he, and Pete, discovered was that every region of this country already had advanced, intensely rich musical traditions. They became instead the indoctrinated, and Pete went on to mine the traditional folk music of black and white rural Protestant culture for decades. He brought that value system, woven into every line and bar, to more than one generation of young people, creating a mythos and world view that still is the bedrock of what we call progressive ideology.

One of the themes is salvation and redemption. The forces against us may be overwhelming, but we shall not be moved. We shall overcome. We will ascend to the mountaintop, and we will find a way to all live together.



Though the cities start to crumble
And the towers fall around us
The sun is slowly fading
And it's colder than the sea
It is written "From the desert
To the mountain they shall lead us
By the hand and by the heart
They will comfort you and me
In their innocence and trusting
They will teach us to be free"

But who is the "they" in these lyrics?

Boomers were the generation who said "Don't trust anyone over 30". We WERE the Youth Generation. The sad fact is, we've not given up on that image of ourselves -- what we see when we look in the mirror is not reality. And while we still view one another as "young at heart", if we're being charitable, we do not extend that generosity to the generations who have come up after us. We do not respect or trust our descendents, so we cannot turn to "the children" for salvation. Not OUR children.

But the endemic racism of white America has another group of children we look to for innocent understanding and forgiveness: Black people. Our culture pays lip service, at least, to the full humanity of blacks, but does not grant them maturity. Part of the reason we are so uncomfortable with the idea of leadership from blacks (and women) is because their second-class citizenship is commensurate with that of children -- they may be good-hearted but you don't give them the keys to the car, right?

Yet to blacks, in particular, white America has allowed a second role, covert and profound: prophet. We expect them to be our conscience (as long as we control where that conscience focuses). Playing our Magical Negro, they are Whoopi Goldberg as maid, Queen Latifah as babysitter, Will Smith as caddy, who while cleaning up after us and our children also impart wisdom and, eventually, spiritual salvation. We revere Dr. King, now that he's dead, because he talked to us about his "dream" that included us. We didn't love him so much when he was alive, of course, leading marches and demanding real change, but he makes an acceptable prophet now.

Deep down, we want to be forgiven. We want redemption. But we want the Supernanny version, someone who comes to our house a few times, figures out how to get the kids to behave while we maybe shed a tear or two, slap a schedule up on the wall, but the basic rule of adults over children and father über alles doesn't get challenged. At the end of the hour, Mary Poppins can safely move on. A check-in a short time later shows the magic fix still in place. Nobody's returning after a year or two to a scene where the 10-year-old girl has threatened to tell her teacher about how daddy is fucking her at night and he's taken a double-aught to them all, saving the last shell for himself.

So, while we're primed to the notion of a Black Savior, someone who, if the subject of reparations came up, could be counted on to make an earnest joke of it, offending no one, still -- it has to be someone who isn't totally Black. Not the descendent of slaves, for example. We don't trust they can really forgive us, not when we've barely acknowledged four hundred years of atrocity and the shit that is still going on. I mean, our inability to deal with our racism stems in large part from our hopelessness, because we believe what happened here is not actually forgiveable, is it? And we certainly don't want to put power in the hands of blacks who are clearly the descendents of house niggers, folks who know how we operate but have chosen (after emancipation) to stay separate from us.

What we want is a Black Savior who is descended from the Mother Continent, who is part us, who talks only of hope and change but not retribution or confession. Redemption Cafe au Lait.

Let me state here, adamantly, I do NOT believe this is who Barack Obama is. I don't believe this is how most African-Americans see him, or some insightful white folks. But when you have his most ardent supporters unable to come up with a single policy or achievement of his, just that starry-eyed "He stands for change and unity", well, we're dealing with a cultural myth. I think it is likely that Obama's strategists, and the man himself, has been smart enough to play into it, to know what could be exploited. It's what politicians do, and he's no different from anyone else in that regard.

He DOES have excellent policy, a good record, and a firm stand on relevant issues. The problem is, I don't think most of the white folks who are attaching themselves to his wagon are being swayed by his concrete leadership.

(Here's a link to the issues page of his website, and for those of you already decided to be his supporter, there's a wealth of information on how to do it intelligently at Jack and Jill's How to Canvass for Obama Toolkit.)

I voted for Bill Clinton, twice. I was fortunate enough to have a friend in Arkansas, a strong liberal, who educated me about his moderate playing-for-approval tendencies in advance. Plus I know bubba-speak (the real thing, not the evil Bush version) when I hear it. Thus, I wasn't swept away by his talk of hope. He was definitely the best of the alternatives, and I'd vote the same way again, given the same alternatives, in a heartbeat. Yet it was charisma that won his elections. He was an intensely popular President, with approval ratings in the 80-90% even during the impeachment era. I'd like to remind all you white liberal boys of this, especially those of you so infected with Clinton Derangement Syndrome that Hillary makes your vision go red: Silver-tongued rhetoric of hope and redemption handed Bill the keys to the White House.

I'll be voting for Obama, it looks like. I think he will lead us out of the desert (by which I mean Baghdad) and he'll appoint a new Supreme Court Justice who is not in the tradition of Roger Taney. That alone will be radical good. And when he turns out to be primarily a politician, with flawed process and corruption within some of those his inner circle, I'll weigh that against his character and, likely, go on being his supporter as the rest of you start looking for the next quick-fix. The same holds equally true for Hillary Clinton, and I'll vote for her just as gladly.

Here's a couple of things I keep in mind.

First: The era of the 60's and 70's, against which Ronnie Raygun and the Christian Right lashed back, produced the revolutionary ideas that gender and race, like class, were not biological realities. Instead, they are cultural constructs. As such, they are open to utter revision. The Panthers proclaimed "Black is beautiful." The Redstockings announced "Biology is not destiny." And all sorts of groups began winnowing out identity with the goal of transformation, not just of themselves but of the entire culture.

The response was to attack identity politics (if it wasn't your identity being promoted) and, eventually, an economic onslaught designed to make it so hard to survive economically that most people's attention would be occupied with earning a living, not social change. Make some bucks off any popular theory or art of change, commercialize it, and render it ineffective. It worked well for over 20 years.

But Bush, the eternal fuck-up, and Cheney, the sociopath, went too far. Now people are casting about for a new way to make sense of it all without having to actually Change. Not change the way masculinity is revered, not change the hidden reality of white supremacy, not change the lockbox of religion.

The writing is on the wall, however. Peak Oil is upon us, the polar caps are melting, and no matter how much porn you flood onto the internet, no matter how many immigration laws you pass, no matter how diligently you attack strong women on websites or coopt black men into the world of drugs and woman-hating rap -- being white and being male are not going to remain at the top of the pyramid. You can either walk down of your own accord or get tossed eventually. Partial credit will not be awarded.

Moses led his people out of Egypt. But they had to wander the desert for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land. Why the delay? Because Moses, and everyone in his generation who had been enslaved, had to die first. Their conditioning, which they had through no fault of their own, must not be allowed to pollute and alter the Promised Land.

So, the next time you feel a visceral reaction to that deep voice talking of change, with the swell of music behind it, ask yourself: What change are you assuming he means? Then consider all the change that scares you down to your bones, and (if you've got the eggs), consider embarking on your own path to redemption: One where you don't get forgiven before you've done your work.

And the work involved is not ours to design. Pete Seeger suffered almost 20 years of blacklisting and severe economic hardship because he refused to testify before HUAC. He resigned from The Weavers, who had had the number one record in the country, because they decided to do a cigarette commercial. He found a way to have a good life in the desert, all the same. And his most famous song of all ends with "When will we ever learn?"


(lyrics above are from Rhymes and Reasons by John Denver; memoir from Pete Seeger is from the recent PBS American Experience documentary about his life, The Power of Song; thanks to Doc and Diamante for the editing)

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