Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on the Election

No matter how wonderful Obama's election has made me feel, nothing must compare to the feelings of our black neighbors. A major irritant for me during MSNBC's election night coverage was Keith Olbermann and his pale pals telling us how much this must mean to blacks while showing footage of them weeping and hugging at Ebenezer Baptist and Grant Park. How in God's name does Keith Olbermann know how it feels to be black in America? If you cannot possibly relate, take a lesson from Walter Cronkite and shut your pie hole. The images themselves spoke volumes, and needed no white interpretation. None of us whites know how it feels to be a second-class citizen day in and day out. Whites encounter prejudice, surely, but we are in no way defined by prejudice. Obama's victory must be nothing less than miraculous for blacks. Shambollocks wanted to make sure we included a black record of their important evening, and now we do.

Henry Louis Gates. Jr. is one of the great black intellectuals of our day. Currently, he is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. That's a whole lot of words basically telling you he's Harvard's black face. As editor of chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (yes, the man collects titles like MJ), he wrote an article describing his feelings the day after Obama's election for the Oxford University Press blog.

So what does Barack Obama’s election portend for the future of race relations in America, and for African Americans in particular? I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the number of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.

But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America means that “The Ultimate Color Line,” as the subtitle of Javits’ Esquire essay put it, has at long last been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.

How does that make me feel? Like I’ve always imagined my father and his friends felt back in 1938, on the day that Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. But ten thousand times better than that. All I can say is “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound.”

Sweet, indeed. I can only pray that Obama's victory gives much-deserved succor for a peoples whose enslavement provided the foundation for this great experiment, America. We wish the Obamas safety and good health, and Barack, in particular, the wisdom and courage to continue the healing which began on our historic evening.

Today in Race

Yeah, I know- you've had it with race already this election year. If so, you better build yourself a bunker, because the issue is not going away until at least January '09. The esteemed Wall Street Journal provided a history of whiteness today. Now, it can be said that the WSJ itself is the history of whiteness, but that is a whole other post. The key passage for me is this:

Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in
1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian,
says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was
picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the
same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one
argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles -- light-skinned but
poor -- weren't white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for
debate, he adds.

Yes, we Irish-Americans were not white enough. So the next time anyone tells you that a black can't be elected, you can gently remind them that there was a time not so long ago when a Kennedy couldn't bend elbows with a Vanderbilt.

I'm glad I'm marrying into good German stock. It will cleanse that nasty Irish blood.

Joe Morgan Rant

Ahh...Joe Morgan. Quite possibly the most obnoxious man in sports. If he wasn't blowing up my 70's Strat-O-Matic League (Nerd Alert!), I would have little to say good of the man. My sister's boyfriend, Brian, agrees. What follows is the unexpurgated email I received from Brian this morning. Enjoy.

Michael, So I'm driving in my car Tuesday afternoon listening to the Mike Tirico - Scott Van Pelt show on ESPN Radio and I just happen on their weekly interview with Joe Morgan. Scott Van Pelt starts the interview off by kissing his @ss, "always a pleasure to speak with an HOF-er and such an important ambassador of the game, Joe Morgan. Joe, how are ya..." and so on. So basically, I'm already rolling my eyes and the interview hasn't even started. Van Pelt jumps right into the big baseball news of the day...the turmoil in Queens, with Willie Randolf. Van Pelt asks, "what's going on out there Joe?" Morgan launches into this whole diatribe about how he thinks its unfair and its crazy that people are calling for his head....he also begins to elude that people want him fired for reasons other than his team's performance. He then cites the manager in Texas....some people are calling for his head too, but no one is calling for the heads of other managers for under-performing teams. He says, for example, Ned Yost....no ones yelling for him to be fired. Or the guy in Seattle, no ones yelling for him to be fired. He says that its completely ridiculous that these guys aren't on the chopping block too, but he says that there's a reason why they aren't and the guy in Texas and Wille Randolf are. Scott Van Pelt goes "well, Joe...I think what you're saying is....its because they're African-American." And Joe simply says, "that's how I see the situation". At this point, I almost swerved off the road I was so p*ssed off. I'm literally screaming at radio. My hands are off the steering wheel as they are raised in rage/confusion/embarrassment/etc. Joe Morgan thinks Willie Randolf's job is in jeopardy because he's black. Not because last year the Mets completed the worse collapse in major league baseball history and missed the playoffs. Not because, up until Tuesday, they had gone 1-7 in their last 8 games with a team ERA over 5 and a team batting average under .230. Not because they have shelled out more money then most teams entire payrolls for 3 or 4 players, the underachieving Johan Santana being one of them. Nope....none of those reasons. I am continuously amazed at how out of touch Joe Morgan is with baseball. He says whatever he wants, about whatever he wants, no matter how unrelated to anything it may be. He truly believes that he is above everyone and has a free pass to make an @ss of himself and the game because he's in the hall of fame. Its embarrassing and infuriating. And then, the icing on the cake, is Van Pelt wrapping up the interview with more @ss-kissing, "Always a pleasure to speak with a man who is not afraid to voice his opinion about the game he loves so much and contributed so much to. An amazing second baseman in is own right, hall of famer, Joe Morgan, always a pleasure." Appalling. Brian