The Politics of Race and the Photo That Might Have Derailed Obama

It’s useful, almost ten years after his election to the Presidency, to recall how much of the opposition to Barack Obama during his first run for that office was conducted via image, and the promise—or, really, the threat—of images to come. The way he looked was inextricable from the rest of his appeal as a potential leader, and so, perhaps, a game of subliminal, symbolic tit for tat was to be expected. The latter months of Hillary Clinton’s losing 2008 primary campaign were characterized by a Pyrrhically effective, subtly racialized populist appeal to the people she referred to, at one point, as “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” in states such as Michigan and Ohio. As Clinton chugged beers and downed shots of whiskey at every notch along the Rust Belt, her campaign disseminated photos of Obama looking especially black or exotic, or standing next to figures of questionable repute. There was the image of Obama dressed in traditional Somali robes and a turban, released in mysterious synch with the ongoing rumors that he was a crypto-Muslim and that, as a kid living in Indonesia, he had been educated at a madrassa. (The Clinton campaign denied spreading that one.) Then, after the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his more bombastic political utterances from behind the pulpit, pictures of Wright and Obama together, in better times, flooded the Internet and the airwaves.

Black, Gay and a Pacifist: Bayard Rustin Remembered For Role in March on Washington, Mentoring MLK

The White House has announced it will posthumously award the highest civilian award in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the trailblazing civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Obama will honor Rustin and 15 others, including President Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and baseball great Ernie Banks, at the White House later this year. Rustin was a key adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced him to Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence. Rustin helped King start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Six years later, he was the chief organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, rallying hundreds of thousands of people for economic justice, full employment, voting rights and equal opportunity. "Rustin was one of the most important social justice activists in the U.S. in the 20th century," says John D’Emilio, author of "Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin." "Rustin pioneered the use of Gandhian nonviolence as a way of calling attention to segregation and other forms of racism in the United States." We also speak to former NAACP chair Julian Bond and Rustin’s partner, Walter Naegle.

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Source: democracynow.org
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Obama and Morehouse: The Bell Tolls

When I entered Morehouse College, in the late summer of 2004, I was told, quite literally, that there was a bell that tolled for me. Along with several hundred other freshmen, I had just moved onto campus, and was told that I was in the right place at the right moment in history. A school that took on the mission of educating African American men in 1867, just two years after the Civil War, Morehouse has, understandably, made affirmation a part of its tradition. On campus, there is an actual bell, deep bronze and set high on a ten-foot perch, used sometimes in celebrations, like freshman orientation and graduation, to bring the metaphor to life with its rich and resonant sound.

Why Whites Are More Pessimistic About Their Future Than Minorities

They dream in water, cotton, and brick. One of them is losing hope.

Not Tierra, who is black, and whose nursing ambitions could be delayed by another brutal electric bill. Not Ambar, a Latina and an aspiring lawyer who just lost the only home she ever knew.

Dave. Who is white, and who thought, finally, he'd made it. Who broke his back for a dream--a pension, a getaway cottage, security--that seems to be wavering in the Lake Erie haze.

He grew up in Detroit, where the upward mobility of the American middle class could be seen every Friday afternoon. Factory workers, driving cars they'd built, crowded I-75, heading north to their cottages. That was the deal that Dave Miller signed up for when he dropped out of Wayne State University and followed his dad into the firefighting ranks. The deal was supposed to include decent wages, health insurance, tuition, retirement, mortgages, and maybe, with overtime pay, a boat and a house on the lake--a physical reminder that hard work still pays like it always did.