Bad Black Mothers

Bad black mothers are everywhere these days.

With Michelle Obama in the White House, consciously and conspicuously serving as mom-in-chief, I expected (even somewhat dreaded) a resurgence of Claire Huxtable images of black motherhood: effortless glamour, professional success, measured wit, firm guidance, loving partnership, and the calm reassurance that American women can, in fact, have it all.

Instead the news is currently dominated by horrifying images of African American mothers.

Most ubiquitous is the near universally celebrated performance of Mo'Nique in the new film Precious. Critically and popularly acclaimed Precious is the film adaption of the novel Push. It is the story of an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned, teenager who is pregnant, for the second time, with her rapist father's child. (Think The Color Purple in a 1980s inner-city rather than 1930s rural Georgia)

At the core of the film is Precious' unimaginably brutal mother. She is an unredeemed monster who brutalizes her daughter verbally, emotionally, physically and sexually. This mother pimps both her daughter and the government. Stealing her daughter's childhood and her welfare payments.

Just as Precious was opening to national audiences a real-life corollary emerged in the news cycle, when 5-year-old Shaniya Davis was found dead along a roadside in North Carolina. Her mother, a 25-year-old woman with a history of drug abuse, has been arrested on charges of child trafficking. The charges allege that this mother offered her 5-year-old daughter for sex with adult men.

Yet another black mother made headlines in the past week, when U.S. soldier, Alexis Hutchinson, refused to report for deployment to Afghanistan. Hutchinson is a single mother of an infant, and was unable to find suitable care for her son before she was deployed. She had initially turned to her own mother who found it impossible to care for the child because of prior caregiver commitments. Stuck without reasonable accommodations, Hutchinson chose not to deploy. Hutchinson's son was temporally placed in foster care. She faces charges and possible jail time.

These stories are a reminder, that for African American women, reproduction has never been an entirely private matter.

Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, chose the stories of enslaved black mothers to depict the most horrifying effects of American slavery. In her novel, Beloved, Morrison reveals the unimaginable pain some black mothers experienced because their children were profitable for their enslavers. Enslaved black women did not birth children; they produced units for sale, measurable in labor contributions. Despite the patrilineal norm that governed free society, enslaved mothers were forced to pass along their enslaved status to their infants; ensuring intergenerational chattel bondage was the first inheritance black mothers gave to black children in America.

As free citizens black women's reproduction was no longer directly tied to profits. In this new context, black mothers became the object of fierce eugenics efforts. Black women, depicted as sexually insatiable breeders, are adaptive for a slave holding society but not for the new context of freedom. Black women's assumed lasciviousness and rampant reproduction became threatening. In Killing the Black Body, law professor, Dorothy Roberts, explains how the state employed involuntary sterilization, pressure to submit to long-term birth control, and restriction of state benefits for large families as a means to control black women's reproduction.

At the turn of the century many public reformers held African American women particularly accountable for the "degenerative conditions" of the race. Black women were blamed for being insufficient housekeepers, inattentive mothers, and poor educators of their children. Because women were supposed to maintain society's moral order, any claim about rampant disorder was a burden laid specifically at women's feet.

In a 1904 pamphlet "Experiences of the Race problem. By a Southern White Woman" the author claims of black women, "They are the greatest menace possible to the moral life of any community where they live. And they are evidently the chief instruments of the degradation of the men of their own race. When a man's mother, wife, and daughters are all immoral women, there is no room in his fallen nature for the aspirations of honor and virtue…I cannot imagine such a creation as a virtuous black woman."

Decades later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" designated black mothers as the principal cause of a culture of pathology, which kept black people from achieving equality. Moynihan's research predated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but instead of identifying the structural barriers facing African American communities, he reported the assumed deviance of Negro families.

This deviance was clear and obvious, he opined, because black families were led by women who seemed to have the primary decision making roles in households. Moynihan's conclusions granted permission to two generations of conservative policy makers to imagine poor, black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine insistence on control both emasculated their potential male partners and destroyed their children's future opportunities. The Moynihan report encouraged the state not to view black mother as women doing the best they could in tough circumstances, but instead to blame them as unrelenting cheats who unfairly demand assistance from the system.

Black mothers were again blamed as the central cause of social and economic decline in the early 1990s, when news stories and popular films about "crack babies" became dominant. Crack babies were the living, squealing, suffering evidence of pathological black motherhood and American citizens were going to have to pay the bill for the children of these bad mothers.

Susan Douglass and Meredith Michaels, authors of The Mommy Myth explain that media created the "crack baby" phenomenon as a part of a broader history that understands black motherhood as inherently pathological. They write: "It turned out there was no convincing evidence that use of crack actually causes abnormal babies, even though the media insisted this was so…media coverage of crack babies serves as a powerful cautionary tale about the inherent fitness of poor or lower class African American women to be mothers at all."

This ugly history and its policy ramifications are the backdrop against which these three contemporary black mother stories must be viewed.

Undoubtedly Mo'Nique has given an amazing performance in Precious. But the critical and popular embrace of this depiction of a monstrous black mother has potentially important, and troubling, political meaning. In a country with tens of thousands of missing and exploited children, it is not accidental that the abuse and murder of Shaniya Davis captured the American media cycle just as Precious opened. The sickening acts of Shaniya's mother become the story that underlines and makes tangible, believable, and credible the jaw-dropping horror of Mo'Nique's character.

And here too is Alexis Hutchinson. As a volunteer soldier in wartime, she ought to embody the very core of American citizen sacrifice. Instead she is a bad black mother. Implied in the her story is the damning idea that Hutchinson has committed the very worse infraction against her child and her country. Hutchinson has failed to marry a responsible, present, bread-winning man who would free her of the need to labor outside the home. Hutchinson does not stay on the home front clutching her weeping young child as her man goes off to war. Instead, she struggles to find a safe place for him while she heads off to battle. Her motherhood is not idyllic, it is problematic. Like so many other black mothers her parenting is presented as disruptive to her duties as a citizen.

It is worth noting that Sarah Palin's big public comeback is situated right in the middle of this news cycle full of "bad black mothers." Palin's own eye-brow raising reproductive choices and parenting outcomes have been deemed off-limits after her skirmish with late night TV comedians. Embodied in Palin, white motherhood still represents a renewal of the American dream; black motherhood represents its downfall.

Each of these stories, situated in a long tradition of pathologizing black motherhood, serves a purpose. Each encourages Americans to see black motherhood as a distortion of true motherhood ideals. Its effect is troublesome for all mothers of all races who must navigate complex personal, familial, social, and political circumstances.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.

A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity?: Barack Obama

A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity?: Barack Obama
by Mark Anthony Neal

In the aftermath of his victory last November, even Barack Obama’s most strident detractors had to admit that he ran a nearly flawless campaign. Election campaigns are steeped in science and indeed the Obama campaign came as close to perfecting that science as any presidential candidate has in the television era.

But there was another remarkable science at play, a science that is often given short shrift, if acknowledged at all. Barack Obama had many challenges in his 20-month campaign for the presidency, but I would argue that none was more daunting than making the nation-at-large comfortable with the very idea of a black man as Commander-in-Chief.

As such Obama, particularly in the closing moments of his presidential campaign, performed a nearly flawless (black) masculinity, that raised critical questions about the meanings of American masculinity and black masculinity, in particular, as the new President transitioned from campaigning to governing. As a black man and US President, Barack Obama’s body is the literal terrain in which the always already competing logics of black masculinity and presidential masculinity (an under-interrogated site of masculine construction)—both bound to popular mythology—have inevitably collided. Obama’s ability to negotiate this space—and truthfully he has little choice in the matter—only heightens the reality of his status as the most exceptional “Negro” to have ever graced the stage—“Barack Obama” is a performance that was surely meant for a holiday release starring Will Smith.

If such a (nearly) flawless performance of masculinity is the context in which this nation elected its first President of African descent, such a reality does not bode well for the idea of a so-called post-Race society. Indeed real parity in this regard, borrowing a logic Dwight McBride fashions in his book Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch, would be to elect a Black American candidate as nominally mediocre as the forty-three men who preceded Obama in the oval office and I’ll willingly concede that Obama’s immediate predecessor, number forty-three, might taint the sample.

In a provocative essay published three years before Obama’s election, writer Thomas Glave imagines the criteria for a first black President. I cite Glave at length here:

“that if the president were black, he would of course have to be a “good” black—light skinned, surely thus skirting associations with the darkness of evil, ugliness, and licentiousness; serious appearing (as opposed to feckless); not too young appearing, young black men equaling in the skewed popular imagination danger, frenzied sexual appetites, general depravity, and so on. The black president would greatly benefit from “legitimization” of a preferably elite education…He would also have to be remorselessly capable of spelling his own name and that of his cabinet members: a combination, say of Colin Powell, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond, but subtly deracialized out of the dangerousness of blackness and inducted…into the approved realm of tacitly “honorary” whiteness.” (Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent)

Glave’s essay, which could have served as a cursory blueprint for then Senator Obama’s Presidential desires, captures both the high ends and low ends of national expectation on what might qualify a black man to be President. Obama had to run against the very blackness that made his candidacy legible in the first place, raising the concern that had Obama simply been a talented first term Senator from Illinois who happened to be white and male, would we have even bothered to pay attention?—would he even had been legible to us in the way that Obama was not only legible—but knowable to African-American voters, if not mainstream on the American electorate?

President Obama’s initial struggles with African-American voters are well documented with many citing the role that many African-American icons, notably Oprah Winfrey, played in laying a claim on the value of his blackness, that his name, African heritage and “fatherless” status was unable to articulate. As journalist Joan Morgan observes in her essay “Black Like Barack” there is a “proprietary tendency off native born Americans to use “black” and “African-American” interchangeably—as if to be black in America is necessarily to be descended from this ancestry.” (The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union”) Obama could be black, but for African-American voters—the the most visible arbiters of contemporary blackness—he could not be African-American in the idiosyncratic way that “blackness” is filtered through the prism of the African-American experience.

Literary scholar Robert Reid-Pharr explains it this way: “blackness is perhaps the most tradition-bound product that [the] country manufactures,” adding that the “Black American is not produced at the location at which the African was dehumanized, at the point at which he becomes a nigger…Instead the Black American is produced at precisely that moment at which the attempt to dehumanize the African is met by the equally bold attempt to resist that dehumanization.” (Once You Go Black: Choice Desire and the Black American Intellectual) Indeed it was an explicit appeal to black woman voters in South Carolina, with Winfrey and Michele Obama functioning as proxies, that helped Obama sway the black political mainstream, in large part because of former President Bill Clinton’s unwitting assist in the effort by reproducing demeaning references to black achievement and black aspiration that black voters—particularly strivers—were particularly sensitive to. Overnight, Obama had been made black though, his “fatherlessness” would put a fine point on that fact.

The Obama campaign tried throughout the presidential election season to downplay the significance of his race to mainstream voters, but Obama stood as such a dramatic counterpoint to long-held stereotypes about African-American men as fathers and husbands. In this regard, his ascendency challenged myths not only about the capacity of African-Americans to serve as commander-in-chief, but myths about black men as fathers. In his bestselling memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama provides a heart-wrenching account of the impact that not having his father in his life had on him. Obama’s parents divorced when he was a child and he had little contact with his father, who died in 1982. Obama literally had to conjure a father, who he saw only once after his parent’s divorce, recalling “I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams.”

There’s a veritable cottage industry associated with so-called black fatherlessness, as many books and studies make the link between under-achieving black boys and the lack of father figures in their lives. The very idea of the shiftless, lazy, irresponsible black male has reached such mythical proportions that when black men show evidence of even the most basic of parenting skills, it’s cause for celebration. Indeed, much of Obama’s personal appeal lies in the fact that he has overcome the limitations of his black father—an absent black father, who nevertheless powerfully marks Obama as “black” within many American discourses.

Yet it was also implicitly understood, as suggested by Glave’s comments above that Obama represented an exceptional blackness, one that the culture at large—in conversations about dress codes on HBCU campuses, for example—has sought to make reproducible. As Reid-Pharr observes, despite mythologies attached to race in the United States, “blackness marks a site of becoming rather than a locus of fixed tradition.” Obama’s cosmopolitan identity, or what Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s describes as Afro-politan identity—those Africans who live in the world—resonates within the discourses of so-called post-Race America, precisely because it is a moving target, perfectly pitched to audiences who all desired different meanings from the text that “Obama” represents and that they so willingly consume. But with that positionality Obama derives a critical power; Reid-Pharr argues, “The moment at which the Black American becomes a cosmopolitan subject, the moment he is seen, heard, sampled in locations far from the red clay of North Carolina or the red brick of Baltimore, is the very moment at which he witnesses, or perhaps produces, the dismantling of the logic o Black American innocence.” According to Reid Pharr, appeals to black specificity, even as the cosmopolitan nature of blackness is self-evident is, “importantly a means by which to maintain a rather potent ethical position in this country and on the planet.”

As such the Obama candidacy served a national desire, a fiction designed to satiate what historian Nikhil Singh might describe as the incessant need by the American body politic for the comforts of Nation, where “race is the provenance of an unjust, irrational ascription and prejudice, while nation is the necessary horizon of our hope for color-blind justice, equality, and fair play.” In other words, Obama had to be to be a black man who won the presidency—not the honorary white man that Glave and many others, including running mate Joe Biden, suggested—so that the nation could again “move on” from the threats that so-called “diversity” poses to the sanctity of the Nation.

As Singh astutely observes in his book Black Is A Country, “In this dynamic, African—and later Negro, black, and African-American struggles against civil death, economic marginalization, and political disenfranchisement accrued the paradoxical power to code all normative (and putatively universal) redefinitions of US national subjectivity and citizenship.” The first black president might be thought, within such a discourse as the logical culmination of those struggles. Much like the Civil Rights Movement provided cover 50 years ago for charges that White supremacy undermined US national claims on democracy in the global arena, the first black president shields contemporary charges of American imperialism abroad and national anxieties masked as debates about illegal immigration. Obama as first black President needed to literally service the needs of the nation, but his (nearly) flawless performance had to take into account age old tropes associated with well worn notions of black masculinity including negative presumptions of black male fitness for positions of leadership and of interracial desire.

The Thug and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity

One of the prevailing theses of last year’s election season was that Barack Hussein Obama was not the round-way-brand of black man. Such a premise is palpable only to the extent that one chooses to read Obama against the image of marketplace confections of black masculinity, particularly those that legibly erect centuries’ old tropes of danger, bestial behavior, and sinister eroticism. The idea that we should distinguish between the candidate and the thug(s) is one of the defining truisms of contemporary polite society—less a measure of the candidate’s humanity and more so an index of the tolerance within said polite society. But black men do not live in polite society—however effectively they earn their keep within those spaces—and even the candidate’s wife understood this, telling CBS News in April of last year about her fears that her husband might get shot at a gas station in Chicago as opposed to being assassinated on the campaign trial by some desperate political actor yelling “traitor” or “liar.”

As Chris Rock surmised some time ago, niggas don’t get assassinated, they get shot—and there always been more of a chance that the Barack Obama’s fate would be decided by a bullet intended for a nigga, as opposed to that intended for the President, because quiet as it’s kept—Harvard pedigree notwithstanding—Obama never stops being a black man. And this is perhaps the implicit message of Byron Hurt’s film short Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect. The film is a brilliant and thoughtful intervention on the subject of black masculinity at a moment when Barack Obama is poised to redefine black manhood for much of the world.

There is a telling sequence early in Hurt’s Barack & Curtis, where radio journalist Esther Armah, states that “Barack equaled Harvard, someone like 50 Cent equaled hood; hood equaled virility, Harvard equaled impotence.” That Armah’s compelling observation is rarely disturbed speaks to the extent that many of our perceptions about black masculinity have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish the niggas from the black men. Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are little more than brands, in a highly volatile and fabulously lucrative, politicized marketplace.

As Singh observes, “If the ideal inhabitants of the nation-state are citizen subjects, abstract, homogeneous, and formally equivalent participants in a common civic enterprise, than the ideal inhabitants of the market are private individuals endowed with a knowable range of different attributes and engaged in competition and personal advancement.” The concept of 50 Cent—Curtis Jackson—as brand is a no-brainer, as a commodity who implores us to believe that he is a highly dangerous and highly sexualized (to all comers, I might add) embodiment of contemporary black masculinity. Barack Obama-as-brand (as historian William Jelani Cobb suggest we think of him in the film) is less-pronounced, presumably as running for political office doesn’t immediately translate into the salaries associated with being a highly compensated “gangsta” rapper—or a professional social menace. But Obama’s political success was largely premised on his ability to brand himself as a beacon of hope, as an alternative to the Clinton aristocracy and as a black man that we don’t have to fear Branding helps make these men legible to very diverse and often competing constituencies. In widely circulated cover story in Fast Company Magazine, a veteran advertising executive matter-of-factly stated that “Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand…new, different and attractive.”

What branding doesn’t help illuminate is to the extent that the candidate and the thug(s) are dependent upon each other to lay claim to that which their brand doesn’t—and quite frankly, can’t—allow. This is the point that literacy expert Vershawn Ashanti Young makes when he suggest “That black men who display hypermasculine characteristics fetishize—that is, simultaneously love and loathe—those considered less masculine or, to be explicit, that niggas covet faggots has been unmasked in insightful criticism. That faggots desire to be niggas has occasioned less critique…” Mr. Jackson’s ability to wear $2,000 suits establishes a mainstream upper-middle-class identity that G-Unit clothing largely undermines. Mr. Obama’s feigned performance of “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” pivots on hypermasculine tropes easily accessed by those who would think otherwise.

Where the candidate and the thug(s) find common ground is perhaps more nuanced and to be observed in the “I don’t give a fuck” look that Obama so brilliantly deployed in the waning months of the presidential campaign or in response to Joe Wilson’s recent outburst during an Obama address to both houses. As Young notes in his book Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, “What the phrase ‘I don’t give a fuck’ really does is convert racial and gender anxiety into a mask on nonchalance…That niggas carry it off so well, however is exactly why [black middle class professionals] are drawn to them.” Young adds that “whereas rappers exaggerate their blackness and masculinity, [black middle class professionals] are required to underplay ours.” Both Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are fictions that are the products of the larger culture’s inability to imagine anything but radical dichotomies, for black men.

I Love that (White) Girl: Post-Race Nostalgia in the Age of Obama and Palin

As last year’s election season was coming to a close, R&B artist Raphael Saadiq released the video for the song “Love that Girl.” Retro-fitted with a sound heisted from the Brunswick label’s rhythm section—and imaging packaged with a giddy 1960s innocence reminiscent of The Wonder Years, “Love that Girl” is perfectly pitched for the so-called post-Race moment. The video for Raphael Saadiq’s “Love That Girl” succeeds, in part, because it trafficks in the very anxieties of this moment, by inverting the cynicism (born of the same anxieties) that informs much of the political discourse emanating from media pundits. That Saadiq can celebrate his affection for a lily-white white women in the video—a dead ringer for former lover Joss Stone (who half his age) with little repercussion is not the point—Teena Marie and Rick James cut that ground more than 25-years ago with “Fire & Desire,” thumbing their noses, as it were, at Reagan-era attempts to turn back the race clock.

Indeed Saadiq’s own nuanced performance of black masculinity mutes traditional readings of inter-racial desire. The video though, does risk undermining our memories of what the music Saadiq sings actually meant for folks whose political concerns were invested with more than an unfettered affection for the white girl who lived in the next town. As Daphne Brooks reminds readers is her brilliant essay last year in The Nation, much of the black music in the 1960s, particularly among the girl groups, “was about affirming black dignity and humanity amid the battle to end American apartheid.” More to the point, Saadiq’s amorous (reckless) eyeballing would have likely been met by Klansmen and torches if “Love that Girl” was in true synchronicity with the historical era that informs it. And yet this is beauty of the Obama-moment—the freedom to forget the country’s not-so-far-fetched racial history—and the very reason why so many of the old-race guard remained unswayed by the obvious possibilities of the moment.

For example, on the morning of August 29, 2008, another white girl entered the frame and the so-called post-race moment became little more than a nostalgic longing, sequenced as it was, to the pace of an unrelenting news cycle. And it really had nothing to do with who Governor Sarah Palin actually was, but everything to do with the white women-hood that she embodies. Call it a post-convention bounce or the re-invigoration of McCain’s masculinity (the MILF effect) if you want, but the reality is that Obama always loses in opposition to pure, unsullied white women-hood (a positionality that Hillary Clinton’s own political career has never allowed her to truly occupy). Overnight Barack Obama became the contemporary default representation of OJ Simpson, The Scottsboro Boys, Nushawn Williams, and Jack Johnson for many white women—his campaign a contagion that needed to be contained, if you were to measure the disdain that Today Show co-host Meredith Veira barely masked at the mention of Obama’s name. Another victory for gender in the gender vs. race debate, though in this instance Obama’s gendered identity—as a black man—trumps his identity as simply an African American.

Then as in now, Obama can barely risk even a cursory critical response to Palin’s criticism of his administration without reproducing centuries old narratives about bestial black masculinities and the purity of white femininity in the face of black male sexual desire and presumed physical endowment. Obscured in the reproduction of this historical fiction is the fact that American electoral politics had never witnessed the presence on the national stage of a black man and white woman, so highly sexualized and attractive in conventional and not so conventional ways, who were at political odds in the way that Palin and Obama were.

The sexual tensions between Obama and Palin were palpable, if only for a nation that had come to desire the presence of such spectacle in popular culture as some measure of the very reconstitution of nation that Singh identifies above. The anxieties produced in the midst of these performed tensions were borne out in the sexualized gaze placed on Michele Obama’s body—as expressed in black masculine celebration of the First Lady’s ass—I’m thinking immediately of my friend Michael Eric Dyson’s televised commentary—as if such celebration asserts that Barack Obama is obviously satisfied with the well endowed Michele Obama in the ways that heterosexual black men are satisfied and presumably enamored with such things (I stand accused). Never before has a First Lady's body been subject to the amount of scrutiny and surveillance as is the case with Michelle Obama; she has been rhetorically poked, prodded and groped. Many would have found such a line of coverage unfathomable and even offensive if applied to women like Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, or Roselyn Carter, as was rightfully the case with depictions of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential "MILF."

In this context, John McCain’s on-going campaign to seek a posthumous presidential pardon from Obama on behalf of Jack Johnson, the late black heavyweight boxer who was convicted in 1913 for violating the Mann Act, which ostensibly prohibited the transportation of women—white women--across state lines for "immoral purposes"—seems destined to make explicit the threats posed by interracial desire and miscegenation within the national culture that Obama, as a mixed raced citizen, has little choice but to embody.

Barack Obama had little room to maneuver culturally or politically, having to be willing to be queered in both traditional and non-traditional ways in opposition to performing even a healthy black male sexual desire as anxieties about such desire became palpable for the American public. Obama, then as now, had to perform a tightly choreographed form of restraint. Descriptions of Obama as “Obambi”—in relation to his foreign affairs strategies—are the most obvious expressions of that queering process as are expressions of Michele Obama as alternately the kind of domineering black woman that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about in his infamous critique of the black family and some contemporary iteration of the Hottentot Venus that Obama is sexually and politically flaccid in the face of. At the crux of the many meanings placed on the body of Obama—itself marking a kind of conceptual queerness as John Erni might describe it, where there are just far too many meanings associated with Obama to ever read him as conceptually straight—are fundamental questions about his fitness as commander-in-chief.

In closing I’ll returning to Glave for a moment, who in the aforementioned essay titled “Regarding a Black Male Monica Lewinsky,” argues that American presidents are “sacred godhead (and, by extension, guardian of the nation, the national body, and the kingdom/empire) created by people—those who hold the most power and privilege—in their desired image: whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, Christianity, perceived virility, relative good looks according to culturally sanctioned standards of beauty, et cetera.” It is in the context of this particular definition of Presidential masculinity, that Glave imagines—with his undergraduate students at the overwhelmingly white State University of New York at Binghamton—what the implications would had been if Bill Clinton had been involved in an illicit sexual affair with a black man instead of a young white woman named Monica Lewinsky.

Specifically Glave imagines, “A black male sexually interacting with the President’s white publically heterosexual body, perhaps penetrating the anally (and/or orally) receptive white presidential body and receiving penetration in return.” Such contact, Glave argues, would “not only fatally endanger the mythic-symbolic ideology surrounding the scared presidential body’s white/racial and heterosexual purity but also seriously undermine, to say the least, the ‘real man’ masculine power and force the only a homosexually unpenetrated male body can possess and claim.” Glave’s observations are useful, because it captures exactly what happened in November of last year as a “queered” black male body penetrated the office of the US President, reproducing politically, socially, and culturally all of the anxieties that Glave and presumably many other imagined years before Obama’s presidency.


Mark Anthony Neal is is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com and theGrio.com.

Post-Modern Mammy?: The Oprah Legacy

Post-Modern Mammy?: The Oprah Legacy
By Mark Anthony Neal

Talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey announced that she will end her long running daytime talk show in September of 2011 at the end of its 25th season. As host of the talk show, Winfrey helped transform the daytime television format, inspiring a generation knock-offs and in the process becoming one of the most recognizable icons in the world. For all of her accomplishments though, some Black viewers were ambivalent about her success.

For much of her career, it was believed that Winfrey’s success was rooted in her ability to deftly cater to middle-class white women—a significant segment of her viewing audience. Given the popularity of her show—it’s been the highest rated program of its type for two decades—there was an expectation that Winfrey would weigh in more forcefully on issues that directly affected African-Americans. Though Winfrey played an important role in championing African-American fiction (with varying degrees of success), producing cinematic and television adaptations of works by Dorothy West (The Wedding), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Zora Neale Hurston (There Eyes Are watching God) and most recently Sapphire (Push/Precious), she eschewed taking public stances on issues that affected Black Americans, unless they intersected with those of her, arguably, more important white viewers.

While it’s easy to think of those “more important” viewers as privileged white women in the most simplistic terms, it was Winfrey’s ability to turn those viewers—and many others—into consumers of the high end products, high brow art and lifestyle choices that she hawked during the show’s run. While Winfrey never herself shilled for D-Con Roach Spray, Hertz Rent-a-Car, or Rayovac like some of her equally famous black male peers, she was arguably the most effective pitch-person of the last generation, ultimately becoming one of most respected arbiters of style and culture in the country. Part of Winfrey’s winning strategy was in her ability to connect with her audiences, often using her own personal struggles—with her weight for instance—to build a more personal relationship with her fans and viewers. Like virtually all of the black icons who defined black crossover in the 1980s—Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy—it’s easy reduce Winfrey’s rise and popularity to simple dynamics, like charges that she made herself palatable to white audiences.

It was in this context that Winfrey was thought to function as little more than a post-modern mammy. The term “mammy” resonates as a pejorative to many, in large part because of the girth and dark skin attributed to historical depictions of the figure. Often missing in references to mammy, was her legitimate function within the plantation household. While the exploitation of black women domestic workers in the South was critical plantation economies, a point that historian Thavolia Glymph makes throughout in her recent book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, there was an element to the relationship that often gets glossed over. Given the role that black women played in these households—cooking meals, suckling children and other fairly intimate tasks—the white women they served had to possess significant levels of trust in those women.

In the eyes of many White Americans Oprah Winfrey represents one of the most trust-worthy Black Americans ever, a level of trust that may have been unprecedented. Unpacking what exactly Winfrey could be trusted with though, gives a real inkling into the nature of her relationship with White America. Winfrey could be trusted with their bodies, their hair, their faces, their homes, their reading material, their dinner tables, their disposable income—often through the deployment of Oprah approved proxies such as Dr. Phil. Audiences finally drew a line, though, when it came to trusting Winfrey with their votes, as was the case when she broke with the status quo and publically embraced the candidacy of Barack Obama in early 2008.

Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama and subsequent proxy for him during the South Carolina primary (a state in which black women were in the majority of registered Democratic voters) began a tumultuous year in Winfrey’s show. As the campaign wore one, Winfrey’s program lost viewership and her O Magazine, experienced a dip in circulation. While there were myriad reasons for these losses, including the economic downturn and the aging of the Oprah franchise, there’s also little doubt that some audiences were turned off by Winfrey’s decision to jump into national politics. Towards the end of Obama's successful run for the presidency, there was wide-spread speculation that Winfrey would accept some kind of cabinet appointment.

As such, Winfrey’s decision to say farewell to daytime audiences doesn’t seem much a surprise, indeed she likely went out on a limb with regards to Obama’s campaign, because she had already decided to wind down at the end of 25 years. Like Aresnio Hall, who booked controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on his nighttime show when it was clear that the show was going to be canceled months later, Winfrey's knowledge the that she might end the show, likely freed her in some ways. That freedom has been expressed throughout the current season, where she broke from the previous practice of not booking rap artists, and opened up her studio chair to Shawn Carter (Jay Z). Winfrey also received widespread applause for her interview with former Heavyweight boxing champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson—despite an on-air gaffe that seemed to make light of Tyson’s violence against ex-wife Robin Givens—and her recent chat with former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

With her time on-camera seemingly coming to the end, Winfrey seems poised, through her planned cable network, to create the context for the next generation of women and Black Americans to bring something unique to the airwaves. Ultimately this will stand in as Winfrey’s most important legacy.


Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com and theGrio.com.

Nation of Cowards: Uncle Tom, Watch Your Mouth

“Watch Your Mouth (Uncle) Tom:
How Our Black Pride in the President Works Against Us”

The morning after the Democrats were trounced in two significant gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Tom Joyner remarked on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" that a large part of the blame rested squarely on Barack Obama’s shoulders. The Democrats lost, Joyner argued pointedly, because black people stayed home. And they stayed home because Barack Obama has basically ignored them since he’s become president. Noting sardonically that Obama was “around all the time” on the show during his historic run to the presidency but had yet to appear on his show after being elected, Joyner issued a warning to Obama. If he expected to get elected again in 2012, he’d better not forget about black America. When Joyner went to the phone lines, allowing his listeners to weight in on the topic, he was roundly lampooned. Recalling the heat that Tavis Smiley—a longtime commentator on Joyner’s show—took from the black community after admonishing then Democrat candidate Obama for failing to address black social concerns in his political agenda, Joyner found himself in the proverbial hot seat. One caller went so far as to label Joyner an “Uncle Tom” for his criticism of the president. The message that was coming across the lines was loud and clear. Criticizing Barack Obama—especially if you are black—is off-limits. Politics be damned.

The salient problem with this posture is that it confuses strategic political agitation with betraying the African American community’s best socioeconomic interest. It is not, in fact, a contradiction for one to be both proud of Barack Obama’s accomplishments from a cultural perspective and fiercely demanding of him on a political front. Maintaining such a posture is not only healthy for the democratic process, but necessary if one expects the black community’s concerns to get aired and taken seriously in the public domain. The uncontested king of the sound bite Al Sharpton put it best on Joyner’s show when he quipped, “We elected a president not a Messiah.” Unlike Joyner, however, Sharpton hoisted the blame for the gubernatorial losses onto the black community, arguing that blacks at the grassroots level need to become more active in the political process—namely, by supporting the president’s initiatives such as healthcare—if they expect their circumstances on the ground to change. And, perhaps on some level Sharpton and Joyner are both right. However it shakes out, the cold, hard truth is that the black community is in serious trouble economically and socially and nobody seems to notice. In their recent op-ed article, “The Destruction of the Black Middle Class,” acclaimed writer-activist Barbara Ehrenreich and inequality researcher-activist Dedrick Muhammad sound the alarm about the downward socioeconomic spiral of black middle class. Debunking the widely held notion that the socioeconomic circumstances for the black middle class are steadily improving over time, Ehrenreich and Muhammad point to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy that reveals that at the start of our current recession—which officially began in December, 2007—“33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out the middle class.” They write that for the black middle class the recession actually began in 2000. Between 2000 and 2007, “black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent.” During this stretch, “one third of black children lived in poverty and black employment—even among college graduates—consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.”

The major headline a few days ago was that the national unemployment rate had tipped over the 10% mark. Quiet as its kept, the black unemployment rate at the beginning of the recession was already around 15% and will, in all likelihood, eclipse the 20% mark before the year is done. Moreover, the income gap between African Americans and whites is widening rather than narrowing. Suffice it to say that Africans Americans across class lines have very little reason to have hope at the moment. Not only should Tom Joyner be speaking up and out, but the black community should be backing him up rather than shouting him down. Insofar as Washington politics go, the squeaky wheel of mass public agitation gets the grease of media coverage and political attention. "Silence," however, as House Majority Whip James Clyburn warns us, "is consent." While the symbolic capital of having a black family in the White House and a black man at the helm of the presidency fills many of us with hope for our future, the reality is that hope won't explode structural inequalities, end poverty, secure jobs in the black community, improve our educational system, or pay our bills. "When you pray," goes the ancient African proverb, "Move your feet."

David Ikard is an assistant professor of African American Literature at Florida State University. His research interests include black gender studies, cultural criticism, hip hop culture, and post-racial politics. His book, Breaking the Silence: Toward A Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007), considers the role of black men in black feminist politics via the lens of African American Literature and theory.

Chicago + NCA = Pure Happiness

"My kind of town.
Chicago is my kind of town.
Chicago is my kind of people, too;
People who smile at you,"

--Frank Sinatra- My Town of Town

So, I love that song, and, I love my city...Chicago that is. Now that I am in school, I haven't been to Chicago in months (I'd have to say, I miss it a lot). However, it hasn't recently gotten really violent, and almost dangerous to live in the city--but, as a Chicagoan, I will never loose my love for Chicago or the people. As Sinatra said, "People who smile, at you" I love that! The cold wintry weather, snow, below zero temps, and negative wind chill off lake Michigan...I just love it! I would be remiss if I didn't mention the extravagant Magnificent Mile (Oh, how I love shopping) or the incredible array of restaurants...how can one not like Chicago? As Sinatra states, "The best is yet to come.."I feel the same about Chicago.

Well, tomorrow, I will be going to Chicago for the National Communication Conference, which is being held in the heart and beauty of downtown Chicago--the place I will always call home. Nonetheless, I am extremely excited for the NCA conference, and more excited that is being held in such a gorgeous, attractive, and sleepless city! I am also looking forward to meeting tons of new people, I love to network, especially those whom share the same interest as I do. More importantly, this will be my first conference, (first BIG conference, that is)..so, as you one can tell, I am anxious, nervous, and excited all at the same time. Also, as an undergraduate student, I feel extremely weird going to a conference with the majority of the attendees being professors and graduate students; however, I am close, I have one more year. Soon, and really soon, I will be working on my MA/PhD--and then, I won't feel so weird. But, hey, what can I say, I love education and am fond of research.

I have so much to do before I leave tomorrow..I feel a little overwhelmed with getting things together. Oh, btw, I am not presenting at this conference--I will most certainly be presenting at the next conference. And, so with that, I say I love Chicago, and elated that the NCA is being held in Chicago! See you all soon, tootlez...

Will a Racial Divide Swallow Obama?

On Sunday I went to the Prudential Center in Newark to hear President Obama make the case for Governor Jon Corzine's reelection here in New Jersey. Already a strong supporter of Governor Corzine I wasn't going to be convinced. And I wasn't particularly excited about standing in a long line, on a chilly afternoon to listen to two men I've heard speak dozens of times. But I was determined to go. One year ago I'd been in Newark to hear candidate Obama make his closing arguments, and I wanted to check out what an Obama rally looks like one year later.
Some elements of the atmosphere were familiar: insanely long lines, intense police presence, surprisingly jovial mood despite the chill. One thing was noticeably and distressingly different: the crowd waiting to see President Obama in Newark on Sunday was much less diverse than the crowd that greeted him in the waning days of the 2008 election. By my estimation the supporters in Newark yesterday were not exclusively, but certainly predominately, African American.
The event mirrors recent trends in the polls. Presidential job approval polls by Gallup have tracked two consistent trends in President Obama's ratings: overall decline and a widening racial gap between black and white Americans.
As a public opinion researcher, I am not surprised by this racial gap. Political science has convincingly and repeatedly found a wide and persistent gulf between the political attitudes of white and black Americans.
For example, one of the most consistent finding of public opinion research is how African American partisanship differs from that of whites. African American allegiance to the Republican Party of Lincoln was solid for the decades between Emancipation and The New Deal, but by the 1940s black Americans had become overwhelmingly Democratic in affiliation. At the same time, white voters increasingly moved to the Republican column, particularly in the South.
African Americans are unique both in the direction of their affiliation and in the homogeneity of the attachment. But despite the strength of this attachment, black Democratic partisanship is quite different from that of white Democrats. There is marked racial division of opinion within the party ranks and leadership. The Congressional Black Caucus often finds itself at odds with party leadership, and among voters, black and white Democrats differ on issues of economic redistribution, domestic public policy, and even foreign policy.
This means that President Obama is not the first contemporary president to experience a noticeable racial approval gap. African American animosity toward Presidents Reagan and Bush, who were well liked by most whites, was a salient feature of the 1980s. African American attitudes toward Clinton were quite different. In 2000, black respondents reported average warmth toward Clinton of 79 points, a presidential score, that for the first time, outstripped black American ratings for Reverend Jesse Jackson. The approval ratings among African Americans for George W. Bush made history when they plummeted to single digits in some polls during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This history suggests that black voter support of Obama is not driven solely by his identity as the first African American president, but instead is rooted in more persistent racial differences in American politics.
Therefore, while my academic-self is unsurprised by this racial gap, my citizen-self is distressed. One of the distinctive and exciting features of the Obama candidacy was the appeal of its multi-racial coalition. I appreciated the Obama yard signs in Hebrew and Arabic, the bumper sticker that read Older White Woman for Obama, the sustaining role of hip-hop music in the campaign, and watching Americans of all backgrounds chant Si Se Puede.
I have always been more impressed by the Obama coalition than by Obama himself. Perhaps this is because as a Hyde Park, Chicagoan I began following Obama's career when he was a smart, but awkward, state senator who endured a tough congressional loss. Perhaps it's because I've always secretly like Michelle better. Whatever his shortcomings, I was thrilled by Obama's 2008 campaign because his candidacy became a space where a real, winning, multi-racial, electoral coalition emerged around progressive issues on the national stage. My greatest hope for this campaign-built-on-hope was for America's racial possibilities if this diverse coalition could be sustained.
I was not alone in my enthusiasm. In the weeks immediately following the election of President Obama, Americans reported significant optimism about the future of race relations and racial equality. But late last week Gallup reported that post-election racial optimism has waned among all Americans, and particularly among black people.
On October 29, Gallup reported responses to the question: "Do you think that relations between blacks and whites will always be a problem for the United States or that a solution will eventually be worked out?" Responses reflected patterns similar to 1963, with 40% of Americans expecting race always to be a problem. And though black Americans had become more optimistic a year ago, they are now significantly more pessimistic about race in America.
These Gallup findings mirror decades of public opinion research showing that African Americans and whites differ dramatically on their perception of the existence of discrimination, and in their assessment of the potential for realizing a racially fair society. These differing perceptions of racial discrimination translate into enormous gaps in support for public policies. These gaps have effectively stymied effective coalitions for progressive policies for decades.
Despite the presence of white and Latino voters at the Newark rally on Sunday, this racial divide felt troubling and present.
Black Americans have become significantly more supportive of President Obama and more pessimistic about the country as the President has endured attacks that seem personal and racially motivated. This trend is potentially troublesome for several reasons. If black voters feel the need to rally around the President to protect him from racial attacks, then they are less able to function as full members of the coalition. Black voters need to be able to both praise and criticize the President in order to ensure their individual and collective interests are voiced.
Further, if President Obama's poll numbers are primarily bolstered by an enthusiastic, but racially isolated core, then his administration becomes more vulnerable to unfairly racialized attacks from opponents. Those opponents could seek to cast President Obama as a protector of identity-group interests, rather than as a broad representative of American interests.
President Obama and his administration may seek to distance themselves from the negative implications of racialized support by enacting social conservatives policies. This was a strategy used by President Clinton during the second half of his first term. It has the perverse effect of punishing African Americans for their political support and loyalty.
Even as Democrats seek to pass health care reform they need also to aggressively rebuild the foundation of mullti-racial enthusiasm that drove the 2008 election. President Obama's efficacy is seriously undermined to the extent that his base shrinks and divides along racial lines.
Even more important, Americans' faith in our capacity to find common ground and achieve collective aims is eroding--quickly.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.