I remember in the campaign days, and most certainly after the election that current President Barack Obama was fashioning himself after this country’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln. I remember in my own mind that I thought that that was highly weird, but I figured that since he ran the best campaign this country has ever seen, I figured he knew what he was doing. But, in hindsight, I’m even more convinced that he did not.
When he tossed his hat into the race in Springfield, Illinois on the steps of the Old Capitol, he was already taking the approach of Abraham Lincoln trying to united a divided country. At least that was the underlying message and theme behind shaping himself after Lincoln. But, in my own imagination, that just didn’t make sense to me because what kept replaying in the back of my head was that Lincoln was not this great emancipator that we still teach and ideologically believe. The simple wording of the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the states that had not seceded from the Union of Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri or Maryland nor did it grant freedom to slaves in certain counties in Virginia (present-day West Virginia), New Orleans and some other assorted parishes nor was Tennessee to fall under this presidential act.
So, to see the first African American president align himself with Lincoln didn’t quite make sense.
This also with the fact that as the days to the election were coming to a close that the domestic issues of the economy more or less sealed the deal for Obama winning. I just knew, I just knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I would have heard more echoes of another famous president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Now of course, the administration doesn’t want to fully embrace Rooseveltian ideas because of course Roosevelt was associated with the Great Depression and no one would want us to think that we were not just headed for a recession, but a depression instead. It would undoubtedly begin to scare the citizenry and of course give much more fodder for critics. However, where I think Obama could have taken a page out of FDR’s playbook was with regards to the infrastructure building that is so largely associated with FDR’s administration.
Obama hinted at it with the whole idea of “greening” the country, but of course to date we haven’t even heard mention of such plans. What Roosevelt did was set up his famous WPA, Works Progress Administration which added 8,000,000 jobs during it’s existence from 1935 to 1943. Using only $7,000,000,000 rather than the $700,000,000,000 of current TARP funds (yes, I am aware of inflation) that program effectively brought America even further into the 20th century and modernized much of the country and began to connect the far rural places with some of the modern conveniences of technology. Given that there are still pockets in this country that don’t have a DSL hookup and they’re still operating on dial-up, in 2009, that’s the equivalent of not having electricity or a telephone in the 1950s; not the end of the world, but it most certainly doesn’t help a situation.
Also given that following the bridge collapse in the Twin Cities over the Mississippi River, it’s quite apparent that our infrastructure in this country needs to be addressed before it’s too late. So wouldn’t it make sense if federal money went to create jobs in a civilian corps similar to the WPA and the various other “alphabet soup” programs established under the New Deal?
Of course not, this is Obama we’re talking about.
To be frank, it does seem like he’s taken on a bit more than he can chew. So he signed an order to “close” Guantanamo Bay detention center within. It’s my understanding that prisoners are still present on that end of the island as we speak and that given the Senate vote on funding to release prisoners, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Not to mention that him trying to address health care has seemed to prove that Obama may actually have a glass jaw–he’s unable to take a hit and thereby he positions himself where he really doesn’t have to.
I really wish Obama would find some intestinal fortitude and quickly.
I’m not saying that he necessarily needs to pull a Barney Frank and call his critics veritable dining room tables, but at minimum (and I’d never thought I be saying this either) take a George W. Bush standpoint and just fire back with a “so what” to all of his critics. Or my personal favorite “fall back.” Or even if you could get like Dick Cheney who made his friend apologize when he shot him.
That’s just classic on so many levels.
I just always imagined Obama being like Ludacris in “Stand Up” just being able to have this big ole exaggerated shoe and just putting his foot down and telling everyone, in the words of AverageBro “get down or lay down.”
What’s your current approval of Obama as of today? Do you think he could have handled something’s differently? Is he held to a different standard simply because he campaigned on so many issues but has yet to deliver a decisive blow on any of them? OR is it still too early to tell? What would be the make or break point for Obama?
Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL
Initially I was saying to myself, what heartaches could you all have possibly experienced because of your skin color if you were always getting picked and chosen for the special jobs and being teachers pets and what not. They went on to educate me that indeed while that may have been the case with some of the students that had “that look,” that they caught hell on the playground. The playground just being the catch-all for all of their interactions with the kids; the rest of the students hated on them because they saw the favoritism showed them and it was more than apparent that it boiled down to hair and skin color.
The benefits of being in the house did not always outweigh the fact that one was still a slave. Being in the house perhaps afforded some shade from the sun, some better clothes and perhaps a better diet, but at what cost? The black women inside the house were still doing heavy manual labor with regards to cooking, doing laundry over a washboard on Mondays, which often did require one to leave the house and go to a running creek. Or a house Negress was often times the “wet” nurse to the mistress’ children: in other words she breast fed the children of the white woman of the house. Or often times the women were the object of sexual abuse (in tandem maybe) with that of the master of the house. While the field Negroes were able to be away from that which had enslaved them, the house Negroes were forced every waking minute to be in the service of master and or mistress and had a whole different set of psychological difficulties to deal with.
In 1925 when Alain Locke published The New Negro half essay of the same title and half anthology of poems and other essays and fiction writing, most historians realised that something new had emerged. There was a collective uprising, in the era of culture within the black community. For the first time, blacks were merging the African with the American in a tangible way on all levels of culture that for the first time drew the interest of white Americans. Of course even in the antebellum period there was always a culture associated with blacks, but from approximately 1920 through the end of World War II, there was a concentrated effort pouring from northern African Americans in the various fields of literature, drama, music, visual art, dance, philosophy, history and sociology. As a result, we have what we commonly recognize as the Harlem Renaissance.
As a result we did well and produced works too many to name for the sake of this blog and we produced the greats like Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, James Weldon Johnson just to name the big timers, and not to mention largely unheard people like Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, or Aaron Douglas. What makes me swell with pride is that although some of the work of these people got national platforms from the ever benevolent white person to open doors for them like Carl Van Vechten, they still did it for the sake of wider community. Their work was meant to speak to a larger mass of coloreds just like them. Yes, while some of them did it for the sake of proving to whites that we were indeed human and a part of the “native land” of America just as much as they were, there still was some of their work that pointed back to the community while looking forward into the future.
Nowadays, your average 18-30 year old in black America would be hard pressed to name contemporary greats in a roll call fashion like you could in the Harlem Renaissance. And the 18 and under demographic–you can forget it on all accounts. Hell, even this uppity Negro of this blog couldn’t readily rattle off the names of contemporary black dancers, or poets or most certainly not visual artists. One glimmer of hope, and I believe it’s merely a glimmer, is that I personally do celebrate the black urban literature in the form of an Omar Tyree, E. Lynn Harris or Sister Souljah and who could forget Eric Jerome Dickey and even Terry McMillan. I’m pretty sure if you interviewed these people you wouldn’t hear much in the idea of community uplift. Their comments, I would assume, would be along the lines of “you don’t hear about blacks in this ________ situation, and I wanted to be the voice that spoke for the black community on such slice of life issues as this.”
Another glimmer is this era of gospel plays. While many people are criticizing the likes of Tyler Perry or David Talbert, I must applaud them for their effort. Generally it’s easy to see some overarching theme of uplift throughout the play. Usually these productions appeal to the sense of family and community to pull through whatever the problem presented in the play. And I rather like that. Interestingly enough, the audience knows what’s right, they always clap after some sappy line that’s supposed to provide the epiphany for the antagonist of the play or sometimes for the protagonist.
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