Uppity Negro Network™

For those self-identified liberals who are pushing for a Democratic Socialist society, as it were to be labeled, and who also identify as Christians, here’s some food for thought:

If you [we, because I'm included as well] advocate universal health care, fair and equal housing for all, equal wages and salaries and equal educational funding claiming that all of the aforementioned is a right and not a privilege, then why are we so remiss to preach universal salvation making reconciliation unto God a privilege and not a universal right

Happy Thanksgiving.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Here’s a quick post.  Much shorter than yesterdays diatribe.

Again, it seems as though Jeremiah Wright feels comfortable to speak in public again.  Although still somewhat of a lightening rod, as evidenced by the fact that it’s news that he made an appearance, whereas for the previous decades of his ministry no one even knew he existed.  He spoke at a forum hosted by a Black student organization of Northwestern University, who received mixed responses when they decided to rescind their honorary degree–the first an only in the entire school’s history–amid the “weapons of mass destruction” that the media had fired solely at him and Trinity United Church of Christ.

Below is an excerpt from an article about his appearance.  Click here to read the article in its entirety.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright had offered the audience nothing more than a slight slouch and the occasional grin, but his very presence was enough to garner him two long, roaring standing ovations by the time he walked up to the Cahn Auditorium podium on Friday to deliver his keynote address.

“FMO unashamedly and unapologetically stands in support of Rev. Wright,” For Members Only Coordinator Zachary Parker had told a loudly cheering crowd. Parker was referring to Northwestern’s decision to rescind their offer of an honorary degree to Wright after his sermons made national headlines because of his ties to presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

But once Wright took to the stage and the crowd members found their seats, President-elect Obama’s former pastor delivered the keynote address for the “State of the Black Union” in a markedly softer and more humorous tone than the students who had spoken before him at the event, sponsored by FMO, the black student group.

Donning a brown and black African-pattern vest and carrying a black binder to the podium, Wright offered up “just some points of clarification” about the forces that had thrust him into the national spotlight. His “God damn America” sermon? A white professor at Harvard said a similar thing in 1901. The first ever election of a black President? “Incredibly powerful” and “awesomely inspiring.” Unfair treatment from the media? “Ray Charles can see that.”

Wright moved quickly into a history lecture of sorts, which he gave in a deliberate manner that was a far cry from the raspy intonations of his most infamous sermons. He offered his four decades of work in academia and 36 years as a pastor “in the hood” as qualifications for him to speak about “redeeming and reclaiming our community.” [emphasis added]

I always get offended when I read articles like this because the bias begins to come out in the article.  If you note the italicized portion of the above quote, I think such an observation still carries the weight of the unknown about the black preaching moment.  Whereas what Frank Thomas in his book They’d Like To Never Quit Praising God notes that traditional Westernized preaching attempts to move the listener on the basis of cognitive persuasion, Black preaching styles often appeal to the emotive senses.  It is evident because whites in this country were clearly emotional about how the felt toward Jeremiah Wright, Otis Moss III and the members of Trinity, albeit probably not the types of emotions that Wright would have wanted.

On AverageBro, he posted a clip from a Bill Maher show of all the D-bags that we officially can say goodbye to now that the election is over, and he included a quick clip of Jeremiah Wright.  I always have been and always be a Wright apologist–you should know why by now–and one commenter replied to my question “I’m with Chris Matthews: I’m still trying to figure out how what Jeremiah Wright said was erroneous or untruthful?” and their response was that he was old school.

Actually, after listening to Rev’s sermons for years, I actually believe he was very much constructive in appealing to both the cognitive and emotive senses of the congregants.  Wright has a very conversational approach to preaching.  His rhetorical style does not at all fall in the stereotypical category of black preaching.  The crescendoes that were played endlessly this past spring were not even remotely indicative of the 36 years in Trinity’s pulpit and his 41 years of combined ministry.  Although the world saw an angry man, what the world really saw was a man who so moved by the ills of this world that much like Jeremiah, his namesake no doubt in the Bible, it was like “fire shut up in his bones” that he couldn’t keep it to himself no longer.

What most people have failed to realise about Wright was that in the midst of such impassioned sermons (not speeches or talks) was that he provided the proper tools for which both blacks and whites could live in harmony together.  I would make the same case for Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and Fr. Michael Pfleger. If anyone listens to these three men in their entirety, one will hear the building blocks that they provide for racial harmony. 

Perhaps, the guily conscience of many whites was pricked so severely that they couldn’t contain themselves and they retailiated unlike before.  I would suspect that it is hard for a country to realize that despite the belligerent justifications behind it, that we in fact bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and much like Sarah Palin quipped in her Charlie Gibson interview, “never batted and eye” and in two fell swoops killed instantly over 200,000 innocent people.  We have occuipied a country in the Middle East without their permission, under false pretenses and we’re fighting for the right to stay there and continue to allow for “collateral damage.”  Then, we as a country somehow become righteously indignant when the same terror that this country was built on comes into our own backyard in the form of the World Trade Center being bombed with commercial jets on September 11, 2001.

Perhaps, black people don’t even want to face that reality in such stark terms.  I make that statement because there is a large cadre of black thought that was at best ambivalent on how to view Wright back in the spring.  They no more lumped him into the category of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and treated him as “old school” and almost irrelevant to the promotion of blacks in the 21st century.  Obama’s candidacy and now election seems to have fueled such thoughts of a “post-racial” society.  It’s almost a cognitive dissonance because while in one breath blacks and some whites will openly and freely admit that racism still exists, in the same breath they’ll say that Sharpton, Jackson, and now Wright are old news.

The problem that I have with such cognitive dissonance is that since Obama’s race speech, prior to him taking a bus and running over Wright with it, then backing over him again when he rescinded his membership, Obama has not mentioned anything concerning race.  It was an aracial campaign.  Obama made his “black” appearances at NAACP regional meetings, the AME General Conference in St. Louis and his Father’s Day appearance in Chicago, but they were by in large portrayed in the media as merely stops on his “personal responsibility” tour.

Is this really what blacks who agreed with Jeremiah Wright really want to see as the future of this country?

I’m of the belief that our inability to deal with the harsh realities of this country’s history will doom us to repeat those horrors, perhaps in a different horror, but horrors nonetheless.  I know this may be a stretch for some people–but work with me here.  For instance, with the Prop 8 in California gaining so much national attention, let us remember that there was a time that blacks were not allowed to marry in this country and be afforded the same property rights that their white counterparts were allowed to.  And also, there was a time that blacks couldn’t marry whites because we were considered less than a person and less than human.  If we fail to connect historical dots, how are we going to move forward into the future?

I’m not taking a side either way on the issue of gay marriage, and I’m not totally likening the LBGT movement to that of the modern Civil Rights movement pertaining to the issue of racial harmony, but still let’s just look through another lens, rather than the ones that are often force fed to us by traditional avenues of media and religious thought.

I seriously do wonder how does it feel for Jeremiah Wright at this point in his life.  He preached a sermon last year on the Senior Stateman Sunday when both James Forbes, former pastor of the Riverside Church (yes, the same Riverside Church that Martin Luther King gave his speech castigating U.S. involvement in Vietnam on April 4th, 1967) and Charles Adams preached and Wright came from the famous passage of Psalm 37, the acrostic poem that has verse 25:

I was young and now I am old,
       yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken
       or their children begging bread.

It was evident that he was finishing up his ministry when he preached that sermon at the eleven o’clock hour. It was full of rousing stories of ministry, of his childhood, and of life in general.  But, the sermon emoted a peace that passes all understanding that prayerfully he has taken with him.  I’m sure this has been a wilderness experience for him.  Perhaps including the second guessing a lifelong ministry–has my life amounted to nothing more than three or four 10 second soundbytes played in loop?  Actually questioning, “Did I get it wrong my whole life?  Was I that far off the mark?”

Well, I don’t have a heaven or a hell to send him, nor anybody too.  At times I wish I did at least have a political hell to send folks to because Ann Coulter and Karl Rove would be at the top of the list.  But since I don’t have the power, such decisions will be left up to the Almighty.  Personally, I wish that people would just take the time to walk in another person’s shoes and see things from others perspectives.  This is not to diminish your own perspective, but rather be aware that your way isn’t the only way and to resist being co-opted by tradition.

Do you think that Jeremiah Wright got a fair shake back in the spring?  The AIDS comment notwithstanding, what did he really say that people took offense to, in your opinion?  Should he have just went quietly into that good night, not even making this last appearance?  Do you think that an Obama administration is going to continue to be aracial or even non-racial?  Do they even have a responsibility to be anything but aracial or nonracial.

Again, did you actually read this entire post?   (yeah, I know I said it was going to be short)

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

P.S. Don’t worry, I’m still going to do my post about Lady Michelle Obama

I’ve been a proponent of the phrase “Black America” and I’ve used it openly and liberally here in my blog, however I’ve tried my best not to make it proper noun.  However most times that is the tacit understanding of the designation “Black America.”  The connotation is that blacks living in this country are in fact not living in the same country as the rest of Americans.  I believe that that argument is more than valid.  In fact in my first blog about Jeremiah Wright I spoke to the fact that Wright’s comments uncovered a “second America” that many whites have the priviledge of not having to deal with on a day to day basis.  This “second America” is not just based on skin color, but also economic and financial lots in life.

For this post, I would like to use race as a starting point, however.

I guess in the midst of me studying and recovering from midterms, this following article originally published on October 28th by an AP writer slipped under my radar.  And actually, it’s interesting to see how American’s tone and rhetoric has shifted so violently following the campaigns.  Suddenly the Republicans are speaking about being “centrist” and is Obama going to live up to his campaign pledges and during the campaign, they were equally as partisan as the Democrats.  Even Rush Limbaugh has called Obama a “thug” of all things. 

This is the story in it’s entirety from the AP News story published on October 28th, by Jesse Washington:

What’s more scary: a bleak economy or a black president? The two ideas converge in a small but influential group of voters who fear that if elected, Barack Obama would give blacks preferential treatment when all Americans need help in financial hard times.

Some of Obama’s success thus far against John McCain is because of his casting himself as a “post-racial” candidate who would fight for the middle class and represent everyone equally. The Democratic nominee also says that affirmative action should be extended to low-income whites and exclude privileged minorities like his two daughters.

But the collision between economic worries and fear of a black president most often occurs in middle- and lower-class swing voters, a coveted demographic in this tight election, polls show. The sentiment also hints at racial hurdles that would arise if Obama does become the nation’s first black chief executive.

“I do think he has that minority thing probably in the back of his mind, deep down,” said Charles Palmer of Lafayette, La., a retired oil company manager and registered Democrat who plans to vote for McCain. “He’s not going to hurt ‘em, let’s put it that way. It’s just the attitude blacks have toward the whites in this country. “It’s very negative.”

Palmer has lost about a third of his retirement savings in the stock market tumble, but at age 74 he’s not scared of running out of money. Among those closer to the financial edge, however, fear is more stark.

A farmer from Eau Claire, Wis., was quoted recently in The New Yorker magazine as saying an Obama presidency would mean “the end of life as we know it,” while a retired state employee in Kentucky said he didn’t want a black president because “he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race.”

Obama opened up his biggest lead in the polls in early October, just after Congress and the White House approved the $700 billion economic bailout.

“The economic issue has been enormously beneficial to Obama at the end of the campaign,” said Glenn Loury, a professor of social science and economics at Brown University. “So I think you have to say that fear of economic instability and belief that the Democrats in general and Obama in particular are likely to be better on those issues have won out over race.”

But even in latent form, fear of a black president raises provocative questions: Is it predicated on the belief that the 43 white presidents have favored white citizens, and that a President McCain would do the same? Do people assume that a black president would be powerless against the desire to avenge centuries of slavery and oppression?

Are the interests of whites and blacks necessarily opposed? Is power a zero-sum proposition? And what are Obama’s thoughts about race-sensitive issues like disproportionate incarceration rates or the war on drugs?

“Post-election, with a huge mandate, a lot of these issues will come back and be more intense because it will be a black man setting the agenda for the country,” Loury said.

Obama has assembled a diverse staff. His Senate chief of staff, chief campaign strategist and campaign manager are all white. Still, 12 percent of white men in a recent AP-Yahoo poll said the fact Obama would be the first black president would make it less likely they would support him.  McCain did not respond to a request for information about the racial makeup of his staff.

When Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, some liberal and minority editors were critical of Obama for not appointing more minorities to leadership positions, his Harvard classmate Bradford Berenson told the PBS show “Frontline.”

President Clinton assembled one of the most diverse cabinets in history. President Bush appointed Colin Powell as the first black secretary of state; the 21 cabinet-level positions currently listed on the White House’s Web site include Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice — Hispanic, Asian-American and black, respectively.

Even among white voters who think that Obama would govern equally, such as Dominic Moccio of North Brunswick, N.J., there are concerns rooted in America’s rapidly changing racial demographics.

“People who are in power set the agenda,” said Moccio, who works in information technology at a cosmetics plant. “If Latinos are in power, they’re going to set an agenda that tries to make things better for Latinos … (Obama) doesn’t come across that way, but who’s going to be influencing him (if he’s elected)? Is it going to be Reverend Wright, (Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor), is it going to be Jesse Jackson, or is it going to be Colin Powell?”

Moccio, an independent who supports McCain, said he doesn’t fear an Obama presidency. But still, “It’s hard to be a white male today.”

“Every time I turn around, I see people being treated special because of their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation,” said Moccio, an independent who supports McCain. “All these people are protected. But when I see them, I just see another person that I’m competing with.”

White men support McCain 55 percent to 33 percent for Obama, compared with 44 percent of all likely voters supporting Obama and 43 percent McCain, according to a AP-GfK poll released last week.

Twelve percent of white men in a recent AP-Yahoo poll said the fact Obama would be the first black president would make it less likely they would support him.

Ramon Chavez, a University of Oklahoma professor who is Hispanic and Native American, agrees that “it’s a scary time for white males, because they’re in the last vestiges of their power.”

“If I’m a white middle-age or older male, I’m looking around me and saying, ‘I’m losing power, I’m losing my influence,’ and I get a little scared because the tables have turned. And that’s OK, that’s the way our population and the world is going. So they’re going to have to make an adjustment, and that might mean giving up a little bit of power. I can understand why white people are scared right now.”

Fear can be an irresistible political tool. Obama uses fear about the future of the economy to push people away from the incumbent Republican party of President Bush; McCain leverages fear about values to separate himself from Obama.

“There’s something about everyone to be afraid of,” said Moccio. “The biggest thing people are afraid of is the unknown.”

As lengthy as the article was, it still drives home a fear that still exists despite the bipartisanship that Obama seems to be putting forth.  Actually, it should be the liberals and his own party that should be balking at him because Obama has made such a centrist move.  Not necessarily in policies that have been set forth, but he’s not out holding press conferences trying to usurp the power of George Bush.  Granted some Republicans are complaining because he’s already made press releases about certain executive orders that he plans on rescinding and what policies he plans on getting Congress to pass.  But as we all know, that’s just simply the perks of being the President-elect.  Seriously, what can Bush do in the next seventy or so days that will have long lasting implications? I’m quite sure there isn’t any–he’s a lame duck president.

Underlying all of this partisanship and putrid vile spewed from the conservative talking heads on the right-wing dominated talk show airwaves, I’m convinced is really race.  This country has built itself on fear tactics, particularly from those that label themselves “conservative.”  I think it was a slap in their face that Obama won, and garnered the majority of the vote, something that hadn’t been done since Ronald Regan had won in 1984.  And it was a clear majority, 53% to McCain’s 46%.  (Bill Clinton had only 43% because of H. Ross Perot running in 1992.)  E.D. Hill  of FoxNews as we all know likened Obama to a terrorist because of the fist pound that he and his wife made at a rally.  Limbaugh feels comfortable calling him a “thug” and God knows what awful rhetoric was said on the Hannity and Colmes show using uber-hyperbolic adjectives to describe Obama.  My question is: what are white folk afraid of?

My parents, both of them said that their parents had a saying that said “Don’t nothing flinch but a sore back horse.”  That’s the equivalent of “A hit dog will holler.”  In other words, one can always tell the guilty party, they’re always the one’s who are protesting the loudest and complaining the most or often times, the most uncomfortable with a current situation.  I disagree slightly with Ramon Chavez who was quoted in the above article, by in large, I still see white males in control of the wealth and in overreaching policy positions.  One need only look at the Fortune 500 list or even look at the U.S. Congress which is over 80% white and male.  With Obama as President, that leaves the U.S. Senate without any African American representation.  Let us remember, Obama is only the fourth African American in the history of this country to be elected to the Senate.

I’m convinced that this has less to do with a cession of power on behalf of whites [male] in this country than it does have to do with the revenge motives that have been projected onto blacks by whites.  I did a story back based on the AP/Yahoo poll (of which I didn’t get as many comments as I had hoped) and whites think that blacks have an unfavorable opinion of them.  Well, that’s not hard to believe when often times blacks are just as isolated in our own communities as whites are in theirs.  If whites talk about blacks in the same way blacks talk about whites in our communal settings without prolonged lived experiences, it’s no wonder round the way flare-ups happen at jobs and other instances.  Although, when blatant cases of discrimination abound so much, I can’t help but side with my own people.*

This kind of fear of revenge is the same kind of fear that was portrayed in the groundbreaking movie “Birth of A Nation” that portrayed blacks as “taking over” and ending life as white folk know it.  Aside from the grossly erroneous and insulting scenes that showed random white men in black face as former slaves chasing after the helpless white damsel in distress, there is the scene that shows “the blacks” sitting in Congress and just having fun and making a party atmosphere. 

In addition to that, I believe that there is the fear that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright will be Cabinet members.  The level of absurdity that the conservatives spew resonates with “Joe Six Pack” who doesn’t understand what hyperbole is, let alone understand that much of what gets said on television, be it MSNBC or FoxNews is said merely for the ratings.  Clearly, I tune in to watch Bill O’Reilly bloviate or Sean Hannity just to see what stupidity gets passed off for sanity.  It then shows that people believe that those three aformentioned names will somehow be informing Obama on how to subjugate whites in this country, or at least lift blacks up over that of whites.

Seriously, at this point in the game, I’d really like to see the thought process behind such claims that Obama will somehow enforce policies that favor blacks.  What would a policy that favors blacks look like exactly?  Let alone how could that come from the desk of the president.  Perhaps whites have just gotten caught up on the similar comedic hyperbole of Chris Rock in “Head of State” in which he co-starred with Bernie Mac.

At this point in our progression as a country, I think that it’s black people who are more deferential to white people than the other way around.  As far as I’m concerned, if an Obama administration did something that allegedly showed preferential treatment to blacks, it would be a policy that would have a wide reach across racial lines.  If blacks are positively affected in this country, so is the rest of the country.  We’re kind of like Ohio in the context of the electoral college–whatever happens to us, happens to the rest of the country.

A frequent reader and commenter of blog said that even while at the Obama celebration party she had found herself at the night of November 4th, that one somebody told her that “we have finally conquered racism.”  Racism is still alive and well.  To list the pathologies of why racism is still alive would make this post longer than what it already is.  It is only the blind person who seriously believes that.  It almost seems to suggest that people voted solely on the color of Obama’s skin when that really isn’t the case.  If for no other reason, he ran a better campaign than McCain–Obama clearly won on merit.  In fact, that fact that he joked about being a “mutt” in last Friday’s press conference is further proof that he and his campaign were quite clear to run an aracial campaign (I refuse to say post-racial).

The fact that there is a black man occupying the building built by those who had been enslaved on the sole basis of their skin color which is the same as his is not a fact that should be dismissed by any stretch of the imagination.  Moreover, the fact that he’s the first president, not just not of Anglo-Saxon heritage, or even “American” heritage, but actually of non-Nort hAmerican heritage.  I remember a teacher of mine in high school said this country would almost never elect someone who didn’t have an Anglo-Saxon last name. (But that was in reference to a guy in my class who had a Polish last name). History was made and will be made throughout his administration.

Black America has asked Barack to dance with them, and we’re still waiting on our answer as he stands across the ballroom eyeing us and we are flirting back with him.

Bluntly put, Black America does not want it to be politics as usual.  We want a change and demand a change.  What I think the rest of America needs to realise is that “politics as usual” was in fact detrimental to our well being.  However, at the same time, no one’s expecting or even asking Obama to show preferential treatment as far as policies are concerned, or cabinet picks or U.S. Attorney appointees–we’re just asking for fairness.  Same as affirmative action–just asking to level the playing field.  Whites have operated under the delusion that the playing field was even.  But perhaps it’s hard to see one’s advantage when they’re in the position of priviledge.

Barack, Black America is waiting for an answer.

Do you feel that white Americans have a valid fear that Obama is going to show “preferential treatment” towards blacks?  Do you think that Obama is listening to Jesse, Al and Jeremiah Wright for advice?  Do you think we still need affirmative action programs?  Has racism ended as a result of electing Obama, or have we even taken a step toward ending racism with Obama’s election? 

Who actually read this entire post? lol

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully racidal, JLL

Yeah, I know I wrote 43rd elected president.  Bush was selected the first time which in a weird way to me doesn’t count.  He at least got elected the second time.

Anywhoooooo….

Yes, per my last live blog note, I was really a wreck last night at about 11:00PM EST as were most black people around the country.  As we cheered in the streets and churches and parks and meeting rooms with our bedazzled Obama shirts, I was sitting in our student center, as the blog says trying to maintain my composure.

Well that didn’t work.

Yeah, I was doing alright past the CNN announcement for Obama.  But, as I was trying to drop that last blog line, wondering if they were going to kick us out of the student center, because they said they were at 11pm, I heard Roland Martin’s voice only to look up and see his face streaked with tears and bloodshot.  I was still maintaing my composure for the most part as bedlam began to ensue round about me.

Folks giving random high fives.  Hugs abounding all over the place.  Thank you Jesus’ and Hallelujahs.  Someone jumped so high they hit their head on a hanging light fixture.

Oh, but then David Gergen, the silent force that has kept CNN fair throughout all of this said “I’m reminded of the words of Martin Luther King when he said ‘I may not get there with you, but I’ve been to the mountaintop….”

Well, I just lost it.  (btw, why isn’t ANY of this stuff on YouTube yet?!?!?!?!)

I let a tear fall down my face.

And then eventually they got a prayer circle formed after I had heard “We Shall Overcome” and some other Baptist modern Civil Rights song they decided to sing.  It was definitely a surreal moment because people were taking pictures of the television screens with their camera phones as if we were really at the rally back in Chicago.  So, as the prayer circle had formed (see previous post) and I had heard one lady start speaking in tongues (yes, she really did) and I saw grown black men standing in the circle crying, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the CNN screen down in the right hand corner as the yellow checkmark stood by Presdient-Elect Barack H. Obama’s (yeah, I just had to write it all out again) name and the number 338.

Sorry, I’m a Jesse Jackson apologist as the day is long.  I think as a black man, he was crying because it was a dream fulfilled for him to see a black man become elected President of these sometimes United States of America.  If I can backtrack momentarily–as off color and inappropriate as his comments about Obama were, let the record show, his castration proclivities were in frustration to the fact that he wanted Obama to be held accountable to the community that was his beggest supporters which was the African American electorate.

Well, of course I’m sure there was some “Wish it coulda been me” behind that, but hell, who wouldn’t have felt that, that only made him human.  I mean, I got sick of reading the “Rosa sat so Martin could march, Martin marched so Obama could run….” from either text messages or on Facebook status messages.  Frankly, I had heard that back in February at the Popes of Blackness Convention State of the Black Union in the New Uppity Negro Capital of the World, New Orleans.  And the speaker, who’s name slips me at the moment (and this computer is moving so slow, it’s not worth a YouTube search right now) actually said “Rosa sat so Martin could march.  Martin marched so Jesse could run.  Jesse ran so Obama could win.”  Hell, somehow Jay-Z is going to end up with the creator of that phrase.

**rolls eyes**

Oh yes, let us all remember we were behind Jesse in ’84 and ’88.  And as much as black and white folk criticize him and Al Sharpton they go IN the gate EVERYTIME they decide to let them speak at the Democratic National Conventions.  Clearly we all remember “Stay out of the Bushes.”

Well….moving right along.

So, my live blogging ended at 11pm on the dot and we saw what that resulted in: me trying not to be a basketcase.  I went back to my room after I heard partially the speech that Sen. John McCain gave, which of course was a gracious speech and ultimately gave me joy and peace that we did not elect him.  Yeah,let me park here for a moment–I realised McCain had some fools following him when them jokers booed when he said he called Obama to congratulate him.  I saw a flash of flat out frustration and almost anger when he had to silence the crowd.  I mean seriously, could you have imagined the smugness of those people had their candidate won?  Finally, as most other bloggers are saying, we saw the John McCain that most liberals who think with both side of their brain had kind of liked definitely prior to the campaign’s silly season. 

But, as I saw Gov. Sarah “I totally lost this campaign for McCain” Palin standing there, I saw the most fake smile ever.  I mean you lost.  Show some modicum of sadness.  She was grinning WAYYYYY too much.  Perhaps it was that grin you give when you trying not to break down and lose it all the way.  Or, I think I’m going to side with Soul Jonz in this one: she didn’t vote for McCain. 

Check out the clip below and fast-forward if you desire to minute 2:00

Yeah, wtf?!?!?!  Her name was on the ballot, and the reporter asked her “Who did you vote for?” (in case you didn’t hear it) and she responded “My vote is private”?!?!?!?!?  HUUUUUUUUUH?!?!!?  That was an easy answer: “I voted for myself.”  

Frankly, she’s trying to spring board this into something–a 2012 run, I’m not necessarily convinced after seeing the CNN interview with Dana Bash, but still, she’s got something up her sleeve.  But at least we’ll get a reprieve from hearing that damn up north accent for a while.  I really wish she would go into that good night and just be happy with Alaska.

Which brings me to the funeral that was FoxNews last night.  Granted I didn’t get the full festivities, but when I flipped and saw the Brit Hume was about to bust a blood vessel if he had to say “president-elect” one more time.  I mean, it was classic.  They were all fumbling over their words and the somehow the big boards that they had just weren’t working and it was just adding to their frustration.  Seriously, the ones that decided to smile just made it seem all the more fake compared to the faces of “the panel” including Juan Williams who looked like just stepped off of a Greyhound bus with that damn top shirt button always undone.

Oh Gawwwwwd, I don’t mind contributing to Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity ratings because just to see the crow that they are now eating will be priceless tonight!

Well, I’m at the 1,200 word count tonight and I do want to see The O’Reilly Factor tonight just to laugh, so I’ll bid you all adieu and give you all part two sometime tomorrow.  Along with a post I plan to dedicate to his speech–which, well, let’s just say was one of the most appropriate speeches for “such a time as this” and a post to just ream Shelby Steele who Soul Jonz said needs to have his seat vacated at Stanford because homeboy wrote A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win.

HA!  Guess he’s eating leftover crow for dinner tonight.

Sooo, tell me your election story.  Where were you when you found out that Obama had won and McCain had lost?  Even if you voted for McCain, I’d be very interested to hear what was your reaction and how does it feel, particularly since it was a Democratic sweep, more or less.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying: “When your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, ‘What are these stones?’  then you shall let your children know, saying, ‘Israel crossed over this Jordan on dry land’; for the LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over, that all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty, that you may fear the LORD your God forever.”

That’s the passage from Joshua 4:21-24 NKJV.

As our chaplain said to us last night as we had stood around in a circle trying to calm down from the high that was 11:00 PM EST, “Welcome to Canaan.”

However, our chaplain gave us some stipulations:  “But as we enter Canaan let us remember to not take from the inhabitants what’s not ours; as we enter Canaan, let us be good stewards of the land.”

I just got off the phone with my father after I heard Michael Baisden ask for children to call in if they saw their fathers cry last night.  I realised I at least owed him the privilege and honor to speak man-to-man about the rumor that there was a man supposed to be moving into the White House who looked like me and him.  But, I should have been prepared for his response because of last night.  Of course my mother called and I talked to her, and I could hear my father in the background making comments here and there, but he never asked to speak to me, and I never asked to speak to him.

My mother knows both of us.  Often times we tell my mother to say something to the other or ask a question for her to relay to the other and that didn’t happen last night.  And weirdly enough, my mother never asked “Do you wanna talk to your father?”

So, again, I shouldn’t have been surprised with the conversation we had just now:

My father, essentially told me that he wasn’t all that damn impressed.

My words not his.  But still, he uttered the sentiment that he was happy for President-Elect Barack Obama (alright, I felt a chill just writing that–LOOK AT GAAAAWWWWD!) and said he would have been real disappointed if Senator John McCain had won.  That I truly believe, a lot of people would have been disappointed.  I think that emotion would have been there even if it had been Hillary Clinton who won last night.  I asked my dad point-blank how did he feel as a black man and he actually didn’t answer the question point-blank “As a black man….” but instead emoted a feeling that he’s more interested in the spiritual aspects of life than he is in the physical.

Well, that left me scratching my head.

I mean, I was bawling like a baby just trying not to have the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Sherri Shepherd ugly cry.  As a young black male, I didn’t think I would see this day until I was about 70 years old, but it happened in my lifetime and it happened relatively early in my lifetime.  So to hear my dad, a 61 year old black male, born and raised in rural Louisiana to the parents of illiterate sharecroppers–I mean my dad remembers going to the cotton fields of the 1950′s and picking cotton–actually say he wasn’t moved was not what I expected to hear from him.  I expected to hear some long opine about the joys of God to allow him as a black man to see “himself” in the White House. 

How mistaken was I.

What I heard my father ultimately say (and I’m sure he’ll call to correct me when he reads this blog) was that all of this with Obama was nice, but he said verbatim “our reward is in heaven.”  I got from that–I could be wrong–but that this was his admonishment that we still have work to do as a people.  Not just as black people, but as humanity.  My dad was aware that this was a black man who was elected, but also a white man as well.  I think my dad pointed out a fact that is often overshadowed–as much black as he is, the man is half white, raised by white people.  My dad went on to give a very interesting take on this:  he said that God allowed for him to be raised by whites so that he could think like them, unlike a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton (who he made sure he told me that both he and my mother voted for in the respective primaries).  But also that God allowed for his Nigerian father to have skin color like us.

I thought that was very interesting.

Frankly, I don’t know what to do with that.  My father kind of left me in the lurch.  But by the same token, I fully see where he’s coming from and I think it proves even more the point that blacks aren’t monolithic.  I mean, I couldn’t have come up with that response from my father in a dream.  From one young black man to another, I respect my father’s point of view on this and I daresay that he’s probably not the only black man in America who feels the same way.

Quite frankly, I more or less agree with him.   Perhaps I’m just a more emotional creature and I’m much more driven by my emotions than he probably is, but seriously, I almost fell out with people this morning at breakfast (check my next post) because I said “Alright, the election was nice, but my plight from day to day has not changed from November 3rd to November 5th.  There’s still work to be done.”

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL