Monroe Anderson

Now that Jackson's been busted, let's mum the N-word

          

    Yesterday’s news that Jesse Jackson was caught on tape whispering the N-word is no news at all.  In the black community, among African Americans, the N-word is deeply embedded and all too common. You hear it everywhere. You hear it in the grocery store from a black mother disciplining her child. You hear it on the streets from one teenager addressing another. You hear it even if you don’t live in or visit the black community. You hear it on the radio in hip-hop tunes. You hear it on cable TV while watching black comedians tell jokes.
    So Jesse said nothing out of the ordinary, he just said it under in a not-so-ordinary place in an extraordinary circumstance: On a Fox TV station in an open mic.
    Jackson’s led protests about the use of the Word and has apologized for using it. I’m sure it’s embarrassing to him and I don’t doubt the sincerity of his apology. He looks like a hypocrite. He got caught in a “do as I say, not as I do” moment.
    I say we all should make an effort not to ban the Word but to should it less casually and much more judiciously; that we should be extremely cautious in using it publicly and much more thoughtful when using it in private.
    The N-word carries weight. It’s steeped in a historical and political tradition that should not be ignored. But it’s also a bad habit with roots going all the way back to slavery. It has been handed down from one generation to the next, I think, out of self-hatred or no self-control or self-respect.  So why would we want to take ownership of a word burdened with so much hatred and violence?
    I think we should use other American ethnic groups as an example. When is the last time you heard Adam Sandler or Jackie Mason use kike in any of their comedy routines? Did Frank Sinatra sing about wops? How often have we heard the word spic used in hip-hop songs by Daddy Yankee or Jennifer Lopez?
      We really need a verbal revolution. I thought that it was good that Rev. Jackson held a news conference in Los Angeles 18 months ago, leading the way in what he scolded Obama about, by “telling n-----s how to behave,” by asking black entertainers to ban the N-word.
    I think we should still go from old school to new. Let’s consider the observation made by the Last Poets four decades ago, that Niggers Are Scared of Revolution, then change how we use the N-word.
    That is, if you’re not too scared to do it.

 

Did Jackson's gaffe expose Obama's gulf?

  Jesse Jackson’s whisper heard around the world exposed more than the fact that he has non-reverend things to say.  Jackson’s open mic confession, “I want to cut his nuts off,” also revealed how he really felt about Barack Obama’s Father’s Day sermon at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God. We now know that the ever-enduring civil rights leader is envious; that he is all too human.
    After all, the reverend from Chicago has twice tried—unsuccessfully—to accomplish what the senator from Illinois pulled off on his first attempt.  Next month, Obama, who was virtually unknown five years ago, will be officially elected the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Jackson, who has been a household name through two generations, will be seated somewhere in the Denver convention hall with the rest of the cheering masses.
    But while Jackson, an early Obama supporter, was apologizing yesterday and politicians and pundits were speculating on whether his statements would harm or help his fellow Democrat's chances of being the nation’s first African American president, a more important point was largely  missed: Is Obama playing to a white audience at the expense of blacks? 

    Check out Eric Easter on ebonyjet.com. This is what he had to say yesterday:

Jesse Jackson made a mistake and he has appropriately apologized. His language was unnecessary, his timing off and the venue (Fox News of all places) gave the comment an illegitimate quality that marred the underlying point Jackson was making, though the castration analogy didn’t exactly help either. It’s all about context. In another setting, stated another way to a different group of people, his comment could have had the power to begin a dialogue to address some of the concerns about Obama’s appeal to mainstream voters and what that means.

But of course, it’s not just what you say, it’s where, how, when and to whom that matter as well. He learned a lesson. But according to quite a number of prominent black activists who are strong Obama supporters but “lovingly critical”, Obama should learn a lesson about what he says and to whom as well.

Far from some sign of a rift between Jackson and Obama, what Jackson said was repeated many times in various forms at the recent Rainbow PUSH Coalition by many thoughtful Black activists who, while supportive of Obama, also choose to be “lovingly critical” to ensure that Obama lives up to the promise he presents.

    That this growing opinion surfaced in a troubling way is unfortunate, but the Obama campaign and Obama himself would be wrong not to listen to the writing between the lines.

At specific is Obama’s Father’s Day speech at Apostolic Church that focused on several points regarding the strengthening of urban families but focused most aggressively on the pathologies of a disturbing percentage of Black men.  The fact is that Obama has given some version of his responsibility speech for years. He has written about it as well and as the son of an absentee father he speaks of the issue with passion and authority. It is a Cosby-esque speech (but so) and the message needs to be heard. But, as with Jackson’s example, it’s not what you say, it’s all about where, when and to whom.

    To read the rest of Easter’s perceptive piece, click here. And to see Jackson's offending whisper on Fox Cable News, it's all here:

Tall tales from the black right

    In rare moments of weakness, I try to give black Republicans the benefit of the doubt. I tell myself they are hanging out with those who don’t want us in their country clubs, board rooms or places of worship because some of us need to be in the party for some semblance of balance—a don’t put all your political eggs in one basket strategy. I tell myself that the tainted tenth that belong to the GOP are there because they are naturally conservative and have a right to join up with some of their kind, regardless of race, creed or national origin. I tell myself that anyone who is a black Republican must be a true believer—not exactly the type that’s interested in thinking things through.
    Before I get anywhere close to convincing myself, the benefit of doubt gets beat down by reality: These bee-oh-cons are terribly twisted. Logically challenged, too.
    As conservatives, what do these African Americans want to conserve? The enduring legacy of the white masters?  Jim Crow?  Lynching?  The modern-day justice system that disproportionately warehouses young black men in prisons? An educational system that fails black youth long before it flunks them out?
    It seems to me that the greatest challenge for black Republicans is to rationalize why they're part of a party--the party of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Helms--that can barely disguise its disdain for most black folks. Why bother with reality when you can do this: Substitute the Nights with Uncle Remus for One Thousand and One Nights.
    With bold-faced brashness and a willy-nilly wistfulness that would put President Bush and Karl Rove to shame, the National Black Republican Association has posted their billboard proclaiming that Dr. Martin Luther King was a Republican.
    But wait, there’s more. I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll let you see for yourself. So I’m sharing their lame YouTube anti-Obama video with you. But, before you watch it, you’ll need the appropriate mood music.  Try “Bring in the Clowns.”
    In case you don’t know the lyrics, here’s one stanza from the Judy Collins classic:

Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear
But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here

Jesse Helms is dead--Let's bury American racism with him

   

    Arch conservative and rabid race baiter, Jesse Helms, died, ironically, on Independence Day. 
    For most of the 86 years he spent on this earth, Helms devoted way too much of his time and energy preventing African Americans from experiencing the freedom and independence that he, along with other Euro-Americans, took for granted.       
   In 1950, Helms became an unofficial researcher for United States Senate candidate Willis Smith, a conservative Democratic lawyer. While working on the primary campaign against Frank Porter Graham, Helms had a hand in creating an ad that read, "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."
    When not being outright racist, the five-term North Carolina senator was about as negative as he could get. Not only did he oppose civil rights, he opposed gay rights. Not only was he against communism, he also opposed a woman’s right to choose. Helms was against school busing and opposed giving up the Panama Canal.
    "There was plenty to stand up and say 'No!' to during my first term in the U.S. Senate," Helms wrote in his memoir, Here's Where I Stand.
    By the end of his first term, Helms had earned the moniker “Senator No.” He relished the label, even though it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

    "If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond...."

    Before running for the Senate, Helms was a conservative commentator on WRAL-TV. This is what he had to say about America’s greatest civil rights leader and the SCLC:  "Dr. King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior."
    Helms also called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."
    A conservative icon, Helms defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt—who is African American—in his last two runs for Senate in 1990 and 1996, by running racially loaded campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumpling up a job application, with these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."   
    Helms will be remembered, noted Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University, “for the strong racist streak that articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns.”   
    If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond, who died five years ago. Although both racial dinosaurs are gone, unfortunately, their hate-filled beliefs have been passed down from one generation to the next.
    Just go to some of the right-wing blogs where you will see the pack mule mentality that was wrong-headed and outdated when Jesse and Strom were just good old country boys. The blogs, written by hand-me-down haters in this millennium, perpetuate all that is ugly and ignorant in what passes for conservative thought.
    There’s Tightrope, for one example, a blog where “it’s not illegal to be white, yet,” which features four pages of nigger jokes and sells white power t-shirts on the side.
    Fortunately, the nation former Dixiecrats Helms and Thurmond cherished, and the blog mob on Tightrope pines for, is slowly but surely becoming a bad American memory. 
    And Barack Obama’s swearing in on January 20 as the nation’s new leader will be the clearest signal yet that the twisted convictions of Helms and his ilk are those that belong to a dying breed.

Obama's stab at out-McBushing McCain

    I’m no constitutional scholar. And unlike Barack Obama, I certainly haven’t taught a course on constitutional law at anybody’s college, particularly one as prestigious as the University of Chicago. Still, I couldn’t disagree more with the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president when he says he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing executions of convicted child rapists.
    Like the right-wing political activist Supremes, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Obama fell in line with the murder-the-bastards side of the ruling.  Predictably, so did Obama’s presumptive political opponent, John McCain.
    "Today's Supreme Court ruling is an assault on law enforcement's efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime," McCain said. "That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing."
    "I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," Obama said in his made-to-order statement for the nation’s conservatives.  "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution."
    Who’s going to argue about whether or not raping a small child is a heinous crime? Who would argue that those who committed this particular crime aren’t sick mfs? But do we really want state sanctioned murder of these sickos? What does that accomplish? Is anybody sick enough to rape a 6 or 8 year old is not going to be deterred by the prospect of pulling down the death penalty? So, how do you stop them before they rape again? Wouldn’t locking them up for life, keeping them away from any other children, in and of itself, make for a safer society?
    And one last question while I’m at it: In his methodical march from the left to the middle, is Obama trying to out-McBush John McCain?

Hillary for VEEP--or maybe not

    Hillary Clinton is done. How done she is was made evident yesterday when Patti Solis Doyle was hired as the chief of staff for Obama’s unnamed vice presidential running mate.
    In case you’ve forgotten, Doyle was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager earlier this year, blamed for strategic errors in the campaign during the early primaries. Some have attributed those blunders and loses to Mark Penn, Clinton's top political advisor.
    Whoever is to blame, Hillary was done long before earlier this month when she finally got around to publicly admitting as much. But even as the New York senator was finished, her Hillites kept trying to make her undone.
    The former First Lady’s speech backing Obama earlier this month was still in analysis when her supporters launched a draft Hillary for Veep campaign.
    "No one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings," California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on ABC's "This Week," the Sunday after Hillary’s concession.
    “For me and millions of other Democrats, I believe that the most important step that you can take now is to encourage the Congressional Black Caucus to urge Senator Obama to select Senator Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate," Billionaire Bob Johnson said in a letter to House Majority Whip James Clyburn, who heads the CBC.
    Listening to what these two have had to say at the time—and other Hillites, like hubby Bill, and Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chair and chief cheerleader, I was of two minds on whether the second place winner in the party’s presidential sweeps ought to be placed in the number two spot on the ticket.
    Part of me said, “Let it be,” while the other part of me asked, “are you losing your ever-loving mind?”
    Depending on whose argument I heard or read last, I went back and forth for a while. Finally, I sat down and had a long talk with myself.
    Self: You learned your ABC’s before you went to kindergarten. Have you forgotten them in your advancing years? Anybody But Clinton.
    Other Self: Since you want to play with acronyms, how about DT or SFW or DH? Barack and Hillary would be the Democrats’ dream team. They would be sure-fire winners. They would be double-history, the first African American president and the first woman vice-president.
    Self: Not dream team, nightmare. It would be an unmitigated disaster. Did you listen to Jimmy Carter when he said that if Barack picked Hillary it "would be the worst mistake that could be made”? It would highlight the negatives from both candidates while their positives would suffer in the joining.
Other Self: Did you forget how good the Clintons were to black people? Why do you think so many black politicians backed them over Obama?
    Self: Don’t dare go there.
    Other Self: Well, what about those 18 million Americans who voted for Hillary? That’s no small number. She can deliver them to Obama in November, assuring him victory.
    Self: Hillary does have a hard-core following of older white women but their numbers aren’t as great as her vote tally suggests. Some of those 18 million were Republicans that right-wing mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh encouraged to vote for Hillary just to create chaos on the Democratic ticket. Some of the blue-collar vote, when forced to choose between a white woman and a black man, stayed in their comfort zone, so when it comes to president, John McCain’s their guy.
    Other Self: Skip the Republicans and the racists, what about all the feminists who have waited all their lives and are sorely disappointed because there won’t be a woman in the White House? What if they stay home or vote GOP.
Self: Wicked right-wing wordsmith Ann Coulter was going to vote for Hillary if McCain became the presumptive Republican nominee. She quickly talked herself out of that notion. When Hillary’s women stop to think about McCain’s positions on civil rights and women’s rights, they’ll be giving themselves a good talking to as well.
    Other Self: OK, let’s talk turkey: We had good times in the 1990s under President Clinton. Americans had extra cash in their pockets and a debt-free, peace-loving nation. Besides, with Hillary, you get a two-fer. You get her tenacity and true grit and you get Bill with all his contacts and REAL presidential experience.
    Self: We may get a two-fer but President Obama would be getting too much. He’d have to worry about the husband and wife tag-team backstabbing and undermining him every chance they got.  As former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, the vice president’s office is not that far from the Oval Office and with Bhillary as his Veep, Obama would have a government-in-exile and a government-in-waiting right down the hall. And, what kind of signal do you think Patti Solis Doyle was to the Clinton cult?
    Other Self: Hmmmm, never mind.

For my father and sons, no time for lessons on life

 

  There is no good time to die.  But Tim Russert’s untimely death two days before Father’s Day was one of the worst.  The death of the beloved Meet the Press host also happened a day after he had returned from a family vacation in Italy, celebrating his son Luke’s graduation from Boston College.
    I only knew Russert from what I saw on television and read about him, but I have no doubt that he was a great father and son.  So I feel sorry for Big Russ, his father, who just recently was moved into a nursing facility. But my heart goes out to Luke,         Tim’s son, who will forever connect his graduation and Father’s Day with the loss of his caring and loving dad.
    Russert was only 58 years old when he died. That’s three years younger than I am now. That’s way too young. My father died way too young as well. He was the same age I am now when he, like Russert, died suddenly from a heart attack.
    I’ve never fully recovered from his death, which was 24 years ago. My older son, Scott, was just five months old. My younger son, Kyle, was not yet born.  Over the years, as I fumbled my way through fatherhood, I frequently wished my father was to teach my sons lessons on life.  I regularly wished he was around for my sons to know the joy they surely would have experienced had he lived to share with them a grandfather’s love.
    That was not to be. I am reminded as much this Father’s Day as I cherish my wonderful sons and miss my great father.

    (The photo above is of my father and my nephew, Chuck. It was shot in 1973. The one to the right is of Kyle, Scott and me. It was taken four years ago.)

 

    Here’s an op-ed page column I wrote commemorating my father’s life just days after he passed away.

 

 

A good man and great father
The Chicago Tribune
January 20, 1984

Life is a series of wishes for second chances.

For me, that impulse to backtrack has sometimes been sparked by insignificant little moments. Hasty motions leading to the spilling of milk or the breaking of treasured objects have prompted me to wish my actions had been more measured. Cutting words to close friends during heated arguments have left me wishing I had thought longer before speaking. Missed catches in the outfield have had me wishing I had kept my eyes on the ball.

At other times, rather than an instant replay, I’ve tried to guess what would have happened if I had had a chance to draw up an entirely different game plan during the pivotal periods in my life. When I was going through a divorce several years back, I felt that way. What if I had done this rather than that? Could the marriage have been saved? Should it have occurred in the first place?

Last week, I craved a second chance. I would have traded a year of my life for the ability to turn back the clock a mere 12 hours.

Monroe Anderson, my father and my friend, died, without warning, on the morning of Jan. 9 at his home in Gary. He suffered a heart attack at the age of 61.

As soon as I learned of his death, I began second-guessing what might have happened if I could have stopped the clock and turned it back 12 hours for a second chance. I would have been there at his side. Maybe I could have done something to save his life. If fate had to prevail, then at least I could have had final words with him. In reality, there was only the finality of it all. There were no second chances.

But while he was alive, my father had had a second chance. In a curious and vicarious way, I was it.

To explain how and why I came to be my father’s second chance. I’ll have to go back to the beginning. He was the son of yet another Monroe Anderson, a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta. In 1923, my father’s family’s little tenant shack was uprooted by a tornado. The bodies of his father, mother and 6-year-old sister were found in a field a mile away. My father, one year old, was found there too. As his tiny body was being loaded on the horse drawn cart bearing the heap of corpses, someone noticed him shudder. He was raised by his grandmother and two young aunts.

As a teenager, he came to the North to improve his life. He moved to Gary where life and earning a living were easier for an unskilled young black man with an eighth grade education. In late 1942, he received his draft notice. He persuaded Norma, the 17-year-old love of his life, to elope with him so that if he went overseas, he’d have a family of his own back home.

After he received his honorable discharge, he returned to Gary to establish an instant family by inviting his widowed mother-in-law to share his home; she has been there since. I was born about a year later; my sister and brother followed. Although during his life he would labor as a coal truck deliveryman, a cab driver, a cabinetmaker and a steelworker, his true profession was that of a father and family man.

When he wasn’t working, he was at home. When he went out, he took us with him. What little money he managed to make, he spent on us. He wanted us to have the things he hadn’t had—an education was the most important of those things.

To send his first-born to college, he worked two full-time jobs at two steel mills so my tuition and room and board wouldn’t impose a financial hardship on the rest of the family. It was worth the price to him. My success was his reward.

I remember his telling me how he had taken a clipping of my first newspaper article to show people at the mill. “That’s funny,” his superintendent commented cruelly when shown the article. “Your son’s a writer but you can barely write your name.”

I also recall his reaction to an appearance I made on a Phil Donahue show in 1976 following an investigative series I had worked on for The Tribune. As I spoke, my name appeared on the screen. “Look. Look, that’s my name on television,” he said with unbridled excitement.

I was not only his namesake, I was an alter ego. He took pride in my accomplishments while I found comfort in my belief that had he been given the same support and opportunities, he would have achieved that much and more.

Over the years, my love and gratitude were spoken and unspoken time and time again. Still, there is this hollow feeling inside me that hungers for one more chance to tell him how good a man he had been and what a great father he’ll always be.

For McCain, straight talk ain't what it used to be

    Somebody needs to explain the new Millennium to John McCain. In these modern times, there is YouTube so that what a politician says stands a good chance of being looked up in a flash--by anyone with a computer and an on-line connection.
    Denying and lying just doesn't work as well as it did in, say, oh, the campaign and first term and first half of the second term of George W. Bush. So Mr. Straight Talk ought to try straight talking. If he doesn't, his credibility is going to be right up there with the current Republican occupant in the White House.

    And I am still trying to figure out why Barack Obama isn't jumping at the chance to engage  Sen. McBush in the town hall meetings. I'm also trying to figure out why the Arizona senator keeps pushing to debate the Illinois senator. Must be the money.

    Want to see what I mean? Watch this:

McCain Steele the presumptive winner in the November general

    Shelby Steele, like Clarence Thomas, is an accomplished black men, celebrated by the right, who got a leg up thanks to affirmative action, but who now opposes it for any African American who also might need a boost to the next phase.
    A self-described black conservative, Steele crossed over to the selfish side and, like Justice Thomas, has become a darling of the same white folks who believe prisons are more desirable destinations for young black men than colleges and that African Americans ought to be grateful that our ancestors were kidnapped from the mother continent to be enslaved here.
    Through the years, Steele has done well for himself. He is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute and in 1990 he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book, The Content of Our Character, which theorized that it’s not them, it’s us—it’s not racism but our self-doubt that keeps African Americans down and out in the land of plenty.
    Steele's latest theory was revealed Thursday in a washingtonpost.com story, "A Run for the Ages?,” which interviews black historians on Barack Obama’s landmark victory. The good fellow predicts that the Illinois senator won’t best Republican John McCain in the November general election. Apparently, McCain's campaign team is feeling Steele’s sentiments as well. They’re so cocky they’re challenging Obama to have 10 town hall debates with the Arizona senator.
    I half understand why.
    McCain has a tiny campaign war chest while Obama’s runneth over. A series of debates will get McCain exposure on the cheap. But does the GOP standard-bearer really want to be that exposed? Not if his performance is anything like it was Tuesday, the same night Obama became the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. McCain's speech was so embarrassingly bad that even Fox Cable News--the right-wing's unofficial propaganda arm--didn't have much good to say about it.

    And as for Shelby Steele and his prognosticative prowess, in his latest book, Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, he predicted that Obama wouldn’t beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination.
    If Steele’s really lucky, come November, at least he’ll be half right.

Welcome back to Kansas, Hillary

   

    In this twisted tale of realpolitik, Hillary Clinton has been following a long and winding yellow brick road to nowhere for weeks now. She proved to be an odd mixture of Dorothy, trying to get back home to the White House, and the Wizard of Oz, standing behind a curtain of distortions, misrepresentations and racial coded pronouncements while distracting us with some dazzling smoke and mirror work.
    Her journey ended today.
    Hillary suspended her historic presidential bid to throw her unqualified endorsement behind Barack Obama’s historic presidential bid.
    "Today as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary campaign he has won. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him and I ask of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me," the former First Lady said in her gut-wrenching 28-minute speech.
    Just days ago, Hillary was still hiding behind the curtain, sending out smoking signals that insisted that she was the more qualified candidate. Meanwhile the Tin Man, aka Bill, was complaining about the msm giving her a raw deal.
    Well, now it’s a done deal—Obama’s the one. "The way to continue our fight now to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States."
    The senator from New York may never be able to go home again, but she’s finally left the Land of Oz, landing gracefully back on Terra firm. The Democratic Party will need her spirit, feistyness and   tenacity—a long, tough battle against its wounded and weary adversary is already underway.