Prometheus 6

i think there has to be something else going on here.

cheryl underwood (a joyner regular) is a card-carrying republican. proud of it.

i wonder whether people believe that tavis is supporting hilary as opposed to NOT supporting obama.  

I agree. I just read The Roland Report at Essence...he don't know nothing either (the four comments are interesting...).

i wonder whether people believe that tavis is supporting hilary as opposed to NOT supporting obama. 

I believe you are onto something. 

Tom Joyner just said Tavis said he has too many projects to keep up with...but that he REALLY to hear  feels the problem is all the criticism Tavis has been taking. Joyner said it hurts him to hear Tavis criticized so.

This is deep because Mr. Smiley's brand depends on his being seen in the mainstream as representing Black folk. A general repudiation would destroy him.

Let's not forget, folks, that this is the reason that NPR hired Tavis Smiley instead of, say, the more qualified Derrick McGinty, because "they" wanted someone who could represent and represent to black folks. I have to admit that I have never cared for his style of "journalism." I found him to be cloyingly unctuous and shallow.

Smiley's endless criticisms of Obama began to take a toll. A really smart person would have backed-off a few weeks ago but he wouldn't let it go. So his audience started biting back. That's the breaks.  

Anyone who has listened to Tavis lately knows he's been drinking the Clinton's kool-aid. Either he's lawn jockeying for a job in the imaginary Hillary Clinton administration (minister of misinformation) or carrying their water with the hope they will grant him special access as a journalist to their White House. Either way you slice it, it's a bad career move for someone whose primary audience is black folks.

Did anyone see the following exchange with Tavis and Thomas Haden Church?

Tavis seemed to not be to comfortable with it, especially when the but of the joke was Hillary Clinton:

 

Church: But you see what you did, though - you went Hillary Clinton on us. You said, "I had two lines." (Laughter) And then when I pin you down, you're like "All right, I really had two words."

Tavis: Okay, I was sleep - I'm sleep deprived.

Church: I was under sniper fire in Somalia. (Laughter) Wait a second - I mean we were having a basket of muffins -

Tavis: Okay, I'm -

Church: - but snipers were around.

Tavis: I'm sleep deprived, Thomas. I'm sleep deprived.

Church: You are?

Tavis: And what I meant was two words, not two lines. (Laughter) "Who's there?" (Unintelligible)

Church: She was, like, "We were under sniper fire." And then they cut to the video clip and she and Chelsea are, like, receiving flowers and politely shaking hands. Like, wow, those are pretty quiet snipers. (Laughter) Nobody really - right?

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200804/20080408_church.html

Yes, he is.

And has been for awhile.

Oh, the phonelines were HEATED with discussion this morning on the radio about this.

My problems with Tavis were multiple:

He never had a positive word to say about Obama
He never had a negative word to say about Hillpatine's race-baiting
He condescended TO Black folks, as if we had the collective IQ of Forrest Gump.
Do I believe constructive criticism of Obama is good? Yes. You want to take a look at constructive criticism, check out Roland Martin. Roland has, from time to time, throughout this campaign, been stern with the Obama campaign on what he thought were problems.

Roland, though, never condescened to his radio audience.

It's been painful listening to Tavis, because, basically, he was telling Black folk that they were stupid. And, then, with love, Black folk thought they had told Tavis to tone it down. Despite what people say about Black folk, we are willing to be open to differing opinions.

But, did he tone down what had become thought of as HATERADE towards Obama? No.

He clowned even more around the State of the Black Union. Him disrespecting Michelle Obama was the last straw for me (and I think a lot of other folks - (check out that Roland Martin post on Tavis turning down Michelle and see what I mean), and just in case I needed fortification, tuning in to see him patronize Black folk for voting ' emotionally' with regards to Obama, all the while shinning and grinning when Hillpatine got there = ME DONE with Tavis.

What he's done on the radio, is what Earl Ofari Hutchinson's done in his columns.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/11/113212/039?new=true

I'm dating myself here but Tavis Smiley has an Arthur Godfrey complex. 

perhaps, because i have no idea who arthur godfrey is.

Dayyum you old, PT. Too bad I get it too ;)

PT

Since you bring up Godfrey, have you ever seen the Elia Kazan movie, A Face in the Crowd. 

The movie was partially inspired by Godfrey's career and demise. 

For those unfamiliar with Tavis, ever since Barack Obama had the 'nerve' to announce his candidacy for President in Springfield, and NOT at the SOTBU, which was held on the same day, Tavis has been serving up heaping dishes of HATERADE towards Obama.

When I say that he's done, on radio, the equivalent of what Earl Ofari Hutchinson's done in his columns, I mean that. It was subtle, in the beginning, but as Obama's campaign has gotten stronger, the subtlety was thrown out the window, and the HATERADE has been in full force.

I've told y'all for me. I had no problems with people who sided with Hillpatine over Obama, in the beginning. They were going with a known quantity. But, I'll repeat this - hell no, I have absolutely NO RESPECT for any of her present supporters. Because them standing by her, as she's carried on this campaign of race-baiting against Obama - uh uh. Naw, son. That just can't be overlooked. It is their SILENCE that has been most notable, as they've used RACE to try and take this Black man OUT.

And, I've also commented on the SILENCE of the ' usual suspects' with regards to the race-baiting. I will repeat..

IFFFFF

A Republican had carried on the campaign against Barack Obama that Hillpatine has done...

Oh, 'the usual suspects' would be front and center all up in arms.

But, you know what? When the GOP comes after Obama for being the Black Bogeyman, they can keep their mouths EQUALLY SHUT because they will have no leg to stand on anymore.

Tavis is part of The Usual Suspects, and his SILENCE with regards to Hillpatine's race-baiting was very instructive. It's what you DON'T SAY in combination with what you DO SAY and who you choose to ATTACK that said a whole lot to Black folk.

There is a difference for Black folk between:

1. Keeping Barack ' Honest'

2. Doing Hit Jobs on Him for Hillpatine, carrying water FOR her.

Black folk will respect #1, and skin you alive for #2 because of the utter hypocrisy seeing that you perpetrate that you're such a 'Race Man'.

So much about Obama's candidacy ain't even about Obama anymore. It's about transparency from folks.

We got Black folks.
We got Negroes.
We got Black folks that we thought were Negroes.
And we got Negroes we thought were Black.

Black folks are sitting back, quietly and silently observing and taking notes, not really speaking up unless it gets out of hand (like Tavis and the SOTBU).

There will be some bills to pay once this is all said and done. And some folks don't have the money to cash the checks they've been writing, if you get my drift.

And for those (like me) who are unfamiliar with Arthur Godfrey

"...It's what you DON'T SAY in combination with what you DO SAY and who you choose to ATTACK that said a whole lot to Black folk."

It definitely said a lot to ME! I happened to catch his commentary (…Of which I had long grown tired of!) right after Obama’s speech on race. Why did I think this man would give Obama any credit for it? He instead goes on to recite what the questions were that he had wanted Obama to answer had he not encountered technical difficulties to broadcast them prior to?

And?

I thought if there was ever an opportunity for Tavis to salvage his reputation, it was then. THAT was definitely a ‘Hater’ move!

Why not go point for point to show how the speech addressed his concerns? That would mean that he might actually have to acknowledge the brilliance in it!

(...I was ABOSLUTELY LIVID that he could be so petty!)

When HIS PBS show started it’s 5th season, he made a big deal of showing a wealth of notables congratulating him on 5 years on the air. Endlessly. Like for close to over a week nightly.

The one comment that struck me most was Denzel Washington’s. As opposed to congratulating Tavis, he joked that he was taking over the Tavis Smiley show and to “Keep the Faith” as Tavis is known to say, but then add: “…But send me the MONEY!”

(…I think Denzel probably got it right better than anybody!)

Ubstu34 -

I have seen A Face in the Crowd several times. It is a very powerful movie. 

Spence -

Arthur Godfrey was a popular radio personality who later successfully transitioned to television. I was a child when he was popular but I can still recall the time he fired his popular singer Julius LaRosa on the air live. Folks in my family talked about it for days because what he did was so crass and cruel. Godfrey was full of himself.

The Julius LaRosa Incident

I can now distinguish you from FADDT.

"I can now distinguish you from FADDT."

Now THAT'S an extremely ambiguous statement!

I’d like to think I’m smart enough to know not to presume any other inferred meaning by what you say beyond it’s at face value, but my hope is that if nothing else, something may have come across in one of the previous posts, above, or in general, concise enough to identify my appreciation for how racism impacts the society and black people in particular.

(…Or maybe just that I DON’T have ADD? I hope not!)

Being an avid practitioner and aficionado of the ‘fine arts’ I do know my thinking sometimes aligns itself with my creative thought process, where I like to challenge myself to take disparaging elements and attempt to coalesce them into a discernable whole, but always with the understanding that ultimately it’s meaning is more inherent to the ‘eye of the beholder’ then my efforts to make a personal statement.

But my political thinking and moral compass will always be grounded by the reading the writings of people like George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis because the helped give me a clear historical perspective of the world I grew up in and live in now.

Frantz Fannon, of whom I will forever be beholden to, was able to show how problems relating to slavery and race, though slightly different, being defined by the given geographic politics of any respective region, are all still universal.

I experienced the gritty inner cities of Newark and Trenton, N.J. as a child and also came of adolescence living in a predominantly black suburb of Ewing and had a wealth of relatives in black enclaves like Willingboro and Mount Holly, N.J., The same could be said for the time I’ve spent living in Atlanta, Ga. as an adult and in the D.C. Metro area I live in now, so I like to think I’ve seen black people at their best and worst, but personal motivations aside, our common challenges by virtue of being black never waver.

(…In hindsight, I like to think this is why, god rest his soul, my father pushed me so hard to learn to read! Imagine my surprise when I got to kindergarten and found out that none of my class mates knew how to read and that after testing I was assessed at already being at a 3rd grade level. I can remember telling my father and him saying that he had failed me because his goal was to have on a 5th grade level and to be able eventually recite the entire works of Rudyard Kipling from memory as he did! This from a black man who grew up dirt poor and ended up tutoring Douglas Wilder, the future governor of Virginia, when both attended Virginia Union while working to raise enough money to keep his sisters in college because he promised his parents, who had no education but understood the importance of it, that even with their passing he would make certain that they all got one. But I digress, I know!)

Had my parents never chosen get our family out of the city, I would never have had the opportunity to have access to a community library that was afrocentrically based. I was both fascinated and incensed to know how much writing and documentation had been done by and about black people.

(…ALL of the collective writing of Chester Himes along with BOTH volumes of his biographies? He’s knocking back drinks with Picasso? WOW!)

Why was none of this in the school or public libraries? (…How sad is it that my family had to move to the ‘burbs for me to find myself?) We have to be forced to build our own libraries to get our stories told of our contributions to America? How does America find out who we ever REALLY are if they don’t make the conscious choice to find out?

I remember asking my mother, god rest HER soul, these very questions one day. (…Mind you, a black woman who studied classical piano at the New England conservatory for music and could be a little challenged when it came to a sense of rhythm at times!) But she was not one to spare her tongue when it came to white people.

(…H. Rap Brown had NOTHING on her!)

Her answer?

“Because the white man is always up to no good and can’t be trusted! Don’t be stupid! He never has and never will!”

(…To even THINK to question it was to acknowledge that I was ready to steep to even lower levels of stupidity than I had already proven myself worthy of!)

This made more sense later though, when I realized that what intelligence I did have was not enough to have white people view me as an equal, only to find that my acceptance came when it was discovered that all of the track and field tips my father had drilled into me incessantly from when he was running world class Olympic times were finally manifesting themselves in my pursuits in football and track.

(I hadn’t changed as a person, as far as I knew, but somehow even total strangers knew my name and would use it in manners that would seem to suggest they had established personal leverage with me at some point!)

But, again I digress. As Curtis Mayfield would say on his album Back to the World:

"...I am blind and cannot see. Right on for the darkness!"

I heard Morgan ‘Easy Reader’ Freeman (…You gotta remember ‘Easy Reader’, right?) make a comment not long ago that I thought was kind of shocking, but is a part of what now fuels a lot my sense of righteous indignation of late. He made the comment on 60 minutes:

"You're going to relegate my history to a month?" Freeman asks Wallace in their discussion of black history month. After noting there is no "white history month," he says, "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2005/12/16/morgan_freeman_condems_black_history_mon/

Now, I don’t embrace his concept of ending racism by not talking about it. I actually think that the conversation of race starts with our future generations of children in school as early on as humanly possible.

If, at a minimum, the people of color who are publicly championed February are good enough to have acclaim praised upon them by PBS and the like, then incorporate that into the natural progression of the classroom curriculum. With all of the good that still comes from black history month, (…Which, to be clear, until things get better, don’t take it away! It’s one of the few things I can still cling to!) one of the major failings of black history month is that it’s rolled out as if to say, “Hey! Here you go! This is for YOU guys!

As poignant as the story of Solomon Northup is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html

(Which, personally, is second only to Fredrick Douglas’s ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’ which I always end up reading once a year!)

Few black people know of it and it is of no concern for most white people today, even though it was a major story of the day reported by the New York Times:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/support1.html

Granted, stories such as these are well documented at certain levels of higher education, but if the only way a child has of learning this in school is if they’ve already proven their merit as a scholar, then how does the inspiration of a story of extreme perseverance get to those that may have greatest need for it, or the ability but no means to access the environments that would provide it?

As eloquently as both Northup and Douglas tell their stories within the harrowing context of slavery, the essence of their thoughts are at best, in most respects, voices crying out in a vacuum, because they reach far fewer than they should.

Martin Luther King should not be incorrectly left to delude future generations of school children that he was the first truly articulate black man to speak out against the injustices of racism.

If their stories are American stories then they need to be taught in the school chronologically within the context of American history. Teach the story of settling of the American west, warts and all. Then, the school system bears the burden of making the case of what America has done to reconcile these injustices. At the end of the day, if the student believes the case has not been made, then they need to understand they bear the responsibility of their conscience and need to work to make a change in their walk in life. But if we’re really talking education, the education system should bear the responsibility of not only teaching history, but helping to instill a sense of social conscious.

But then you have a real, ongoing discussion. Kids won’t ask why they’re talking about race, because they’ll understand that they need to have these discussions to help bridge the gulfs of misunderstanding that have been allowed to proliferate as long as they have.

I think overhauling every history book in America would probably be way too volumous and lengthy an undertaking, but I think a companion reader created to compliment pre-existing elementary through high school text books would be a sound, logical way to go.

When I think about it, throughout history, it would appear most white youth have embraced what concepts they have of black people in their youth. Those that have embraced Jazz, Motown, Funk and Rap have done so in a period of their lives when they are open minded enough to appreciate the talents of the artists beyond aspects of color, but their perspectives of who the people are is still molded by what they know their racial history. Those that take the time to dig deep to learn who these people are as individuals, come away thinking ‘This person does not fit the mold of what I understand people of this race to be about. This is an individual beyond aspects of race.”

As opposed to “This is one more individual from a larger a race of people that I continue to learn more about.”

If the latter, then it just stops all the dumb shit of taking an individual and holding them up as emblematic of an entire people. There are good examples and bad examples in any race of people, but, of course, with that, I overstate an obvious fact that is still lost upon a great many.

Do white people eat chicken and watermelon? I believe they do. I don’t follow them home to confirm it, but I’ve seen them examine it in stores and pay for it at check out counters.

• Are white people lazy? Yes. I’ve seen lazy white people.

• Are a lot white people lazy? I can say I’ve seen more than a few, but I can’t speak to the overall race to qualify how much a lot would actually constitute.

• How much is race a factor in their laziness? I’m not sure. I’ve never thought to ask that question given that I think laziness is inherent of a bad value system.

• Who are lazier, white people or black people? Not enough qualified data or understanding of the nature of the question to form anything remotely resembling a accurate consensus.

I’ve been inundated by white culture since the day I was born. How on earth can I be confused by it?

They believe themselves to be individuals and that no one white person claims to speak exclusively for their race. They don’t take like to take the blame for the ills of other individuals of their race, especially when it goes against what they believe is their personal value system, but they do take pride in those of them that they think speaks well of them.

And then there is how they view black people.

They like those of us who seem to appreciate them as people who happen to be white as opposed to white people. They have issues with black people who complain about conditions within a system they didn’t create. What did they do to create it? How have they hurt anyone by just trying to live their lives?

The answer? Nothing and nothing.

But just because my ancestors were slaves doesn’t mean I have a moral obligation to continue to help white people to be successful or like them. I work to make myself successful. To do so, I have to find ways to pull them into my reality by making certain they understand how my reality makes sense to me and deserves to be considered valid by them.

When they can understand where I am coming from, then I will be successful and the byproduct is they will be successful in their understanding of why we both will succeed in this manner.

But they have to understand where I’m coming from. I already understand where they are coming from.

This how I find myself daily looking at the question of race, starting with the stereotype and working my way through them to the truths of it all.

(Though I like to deny all the years I’ve spent in various management capacities I’ve been drafted into, it’s come to be found as a necessary and effective means to an end to maintain my love of life!)

In my thought process, this is analogous to where I take my paint brush and put it down, because I look at the canvas and don’t believe there’s anymore I can do to give voice to what I’m trying to express.

But I like what goes down at P6.

(I remember when the Tookie Williams thread was in it’s infancy! I’ve always wanted to post, but stay way too busy with work and home. I’m shocked I’ve found time for this!)

I don’t know many may see your train of thought along the lines of an artistic pursuit, but I would count myself among those that do.

I like to think of what you do with your efforts here as not much unlike people like Charles Mingus, who, while his music was universally accessible, it was inescapably pro black in all of the best sense of inferences.

My interpretation is that you make people take a hard line look at where they really stand on the question of black people and the extraneous forces that do and will continue to affect them.

To me, it reads like SOUL ON ICE for the digital age:

I had planned to run for President of the United States.

My slogan?

PUT A BLACK FINGER ON THE NUCLEAR TRIGGER

400 years of docility, of being calm, cool and collected under stress and strain would prove that I was the man for the job, that I would not panic in a crisis and push the button.

I could be counted on to be cool.

Eldridge Cleaver ‘Soul on Ice’ 1968

Granted, I’d dare say that even with this said, you may find fault with any logic I may espouse now and moving forward, but I’m cool with that. I enjoy being challenged on my view of the world, because I’m not narrow minded enough not to think there will be times as time evolves that they will need to be reevaluated based on the state of the world at a given time.

(….But my thoughts on race are so passionately compartmentalized in terms of past, present and future tense that, when queued in my brain, they all fight for relevancy and come out en masse on occasion! I struggle to curb my enthusiasm in every literal sense of the phrase, which was always my reluctance to post.)

Hopefully, even though this rant may be in severe need of quality editing, is found far more linear and coherent.

(And for what it’s worth, I’ll cling to my belief that I’m a far better artist than any attempt I may ever make at philosophical discourse!)

Worst case scenario, you’ve only wasted less than five minutes digesting it, but at least if I get hit by the “Big Bus of Life” crossing the streets anytime soon, one or two of my world views might actually be found to be in synch with a few  of your own! 

I’d like to think I’m smart enough to know not to presume any other inferred meaning by what you say beyond it’s at face value, but my hope is that if nothing else, something may have come across in one of the previous posts, above, or in general, concise enough to identify my appreciation for how racism impacts the society and black people in particular.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely. 

There was a similarity in your writing styles initially (length, frequent parentheses), and you registered at roughly the same time. I said in the other thread that my gut connected you. I felt I should let you know you broke the connection (or if you prefer, I stopped assuming).