They didn't "acquit" him because they thought that the glove didn't fit.

      I, like quite a few other people, caught the first part of that O.J. Simpson mini series on FX. And I have to say that it was rather good. A little campy, but good. Cuba Gooding, Jr., in my opinion, is a very underrated actor.

Anyway, I know that the series will bring back some bad memories for my white brothers and sisters. Seeing a black man go free for killing a white woman in America (and yes, he did kill her) could not have been easy. I know you all wish that those black jurors could have found another way to make whitey pay for all the racial  injustice in Los Angeles at the time, but that was not to be. All those black college students cheering at Howard  University weren't cheering because they loved O.J.; (most black folks at the time knew that "Juice" was firmly in the house) they were cheering because they felt that black folks finally got a chance to flip the script on the criminal justice system.

I rarely agree with John McWhorter (although we both agree that O.J. was guilty) but his take on the Simpson trial and its aftermath was on point:

"It is easy to forget how beloved a celebrity O. J. Simpson was in his time — Heisman Trophy winner, N.F.L. superstar, Hollywood actor and pitchman supreme. Until he was arrested in the brutal slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman, after a televised police chase that transfixed the nation, he seemed to have transcended his roots in San Francisco housing projects.

 

Yet if Mr. Simpson’s guilt seemed clear to much of America, African-Americans were disinclined to see it that way. Over months of lurid televised court testimony — now being dramatized in a series that started this week on FX — Mr. Simpson became a symbol, to many blacks, of endemic racism in the justice system. And when a jury with nine black members declared him not guilty on Oct. 3, 1995, black people across the country cheered.

 

I wasn’t one of them.                                

•         

I must admit I was as disappointed as many whites that black college students gleefully applauded the verdict as if Mr. Simpson were one of the Scottsboro Boys. While the police and prosecutors had been far from brilliant, and reasonable doubt was, well, reasonable, Mr. Simpson’s innocence seemed decidedly unlikely.

 

At the time, what I saw was people ignoring the facts in favor of a kind of tribalism. A black journalism professor asked me, as a linguist, to lecture on language and the trial. I’d be glad to, I told him, but I thought Mr. Simpson was guilty. I never heard from him again.

Meanwhile, black friends and family continued coming up with ways that damning evidence could have been planted and obsessing over the use of a racial epithet by a police detective in the case. I felt alienated, angry, disappointed.

 

But I was missing something. The case was about much more than bloody gloves and bloody footprints. It was about the centrality of police brutality to black Americans’ very sense of self.

I came to realize this when, disgusted with the verdict and the response to it, I began to investigate — at first informally — why so many of my fellow blacks’ takes on racism seemed to me to be more fitting to 1935 than 1995.

After a while I realized that the rub was that my life had spared me from experiencing or even seeing police abuse. I had seen the video images of the vicious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles officers four years earlier but had lived too fortunate a life to spontaneously see it as something that could happen to me.

 

To this day I am bemused by the occasional white person who assumes that I have a “story” to tell about triumphing over racism, that I was raised by working-class parents just getting by. I grew up solidly middle class in quiet, leafy suburbs — one integrated, one all black — where the police were the last thing on anyone’s mind. Racism had brushed my life now and then, but not at the hands of the police. This was what kept me from processing the O. J. Simpson business “blackly,” as it were.

What I found when I spoke with people after the Simpson verdict, though, and have found since with numbing regularity, is that what prevents real racial conciliation and understanding in America is the poisonous relations between blacks and the police.  I asked a black office worker what made him so sure Mr. Simpson had been framed, and he recounted just that kind of malfeasance by Oakland cops when he was growing up. And I learned not to assume that only men had such feelings. I asked a middle-class young black woman why she, too, felt that racism was the core of our experience. She instantly told me a story about her brother being senselessly harassed by cops for driving in “the wrong place.”

The conversations were what ultimately prompted my interest in writing about race. And while the positions I took in books and articles went against the leftist orthodoxy, when it came to cops, my feelings had become the same as those more politically correct than I, and that won’t change.

 

Thanks God for Apple. Black college students celebrated OJ's not guilty verdict not because they didn't think he did it. They celebrated...

 

I can think of nothing more damaging to the Black Community’s quest to address those cases where the police actually murder or mistreat...

 

[[But I was missing something. The case was about much more than bloody gloves and bloody footprints. It was about the centrality of police...

Racism is experienced in many ways, but as Ellis Cose has put it, “Rage does not flow from dry numerical analyses of discrimination or from professional prospects projected on a statistician’s screen.” Talk to most black people about racism and you need only count the seconds before the cops come up.

 

Amid the round-the-clock cable coverage of the Simpson case, America learned the difference between what the cops mean to black people versus what they mean to most others.

 

Too few got the message at the time.

 

But after the killings of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and other unarmed blacks by the police over the past two years, the conversation has changed. Many non-black Americans who were disgusted by the Simpson verdict have become more aware of the ubiquity of police brutality in black lives.

 

I suspect that the black response to the verdict, if it happened today, would surprise far fewer whites than it did 20 years ago." [Source]

 

It wouldn't surprise them, and it wouldn't make them any less mad.

 

*Pic from people.com

A "Drop Squad" candidate didn't like Obama's speech. Wait until you read why.

A lot of you Negroes despise John McWhorter; you think that he has been dodging the "Drop Squad" for a long time. I personally have mixed emotions about the guy. Sometimes he makes sense, and sometimes he leaves you scratching your head.

His latest article about Obama's speech was a head- scratcher. Not because he didn't like it, but because of the reasons he gave for not liking it.

"Why was the President’s speech at the DNC convention kind of boring?
Especially when it's this President? Remember that sense of drama there used to be whenever he was about to do some talking? Yet let’s face it, most of us were more titillated in anticipation of Mitt Romney’s speech than Obama’s.
It’s easy to forget how novel Obama’s way of making a speech was just four years ago for someone in the Oval Office. Bill Clinton’s Southern speaking flavor was notorious, but hardly unknown at 1600 Pennsylvania. America had heard a similar sound from Jimmy Carter, not to mention Lyndon Johnson in his more buttoned-down moments.

Obama brought the black English “flava” to the Presidency. Who would have even imagined, as recently as six years ago, a State of the Union addresses sprinkled with the floating speech melodies of the black church? Who would have imagined a President who, with all of his dignity and even reserve, can speak with a faint but perceptible hint of the street?

It was easy to drift into thinking of that melody as lyrics. The humble honesty we hear in the black sound — hiphop, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock — can come off as a statement in itself. Many, for instance, might be hard-pressed to remember just what black rock star academic Cornel West actually says. What moves people is the funky way that he says it.

Obama got by on that kind of thing to a certain extent in the old days. But like songs that get overplayed and jokes that run stale, the novelty in Obama’s gift of gab has worn off for most of us.

It’s great that his oratorical gifts helped get him elected. But after four years we just hear him talking, again. Comedians do imitations. Reality has caught up to “24” and “Deep Impact”: the President is black and kind of sounds like it. We’ve moved on.

Now what we need from the man is content over form, and at the convention he underperformed on that.

“Explainer-in-Chief,” the media has dubbed Bill Clinton for his masterful bullet-point refutation of the Republicans’ nonsense charges against Obama. But why in the world isn’t the President himself the explainer-in-chief?
Why can’t a former law professor, who could even give a tease in his speech about how being American entails not only rights but responsibilities, give us as good a teaching as Clinton did?

“Think about this,” Clinton often said before launching into a careful elucidation. It’s Obama who should have done more of this. He’s got enough gray hair and gravitas now to do that without seeming pedantic. The black cadence would even help rub out any possible air of Adlai Stevenson, just as Clinton’s down-home accent does for him.

Yet many people still thrill viscerally to Obama’s rising intonations because it reminds them of being in church. There is even a whole book about to be published about how Barack Obama talks, written by people to whom this mindset is likely not alien.....

 ....But that brand of spoken-word poetry won’t have the potency today that it did in 2008. There are people who are more interested in how Obama will deal with Sen. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Fox News than in whether he can bust a move." [Source]

"Black English flava"? Did he really write that? "Bust a move"? Yes, I think he did. McWhorter's incoherent and silly article was a serious waste of his time not to mention the folks who took the ten minutes or so out of their time to read it. When he writes about people liking the "funky way" that Obama says things you have to wonder where he gets his motivation for such crap. Is he simply trying to impress his white editors by showing them that he has some insight into black thought? If he is, using seventies lingo-- that is both silly and stereotypical-- to help his readers reaffirm their stereotypes was lazy and superficial on McWhorter's part.

Right now I am thinking that I just might have to make that call to the "Drop Squad" after all.   

The continuing education of the sell outs.

Spelman College is a great school with a great tradition, and after reading the following article by one of their professors, I think you will see why. The author focuses on John McWhorter, but he could have well been writing about any one of my "new negro" friends who blog as conservatives.

Truth is, the only thing William Jelani Cobb shares with a certain right leaning black blogger is a last name. Said blogger should read the following cut and paste job written by his name sake, and send me a nice gift and a thank you note for giving him some education. He claims that he has been reading my blog a lot lately, so let's hope he hasn't stopped yet.

WARNING, this post is a bit long. But what the heck, it's the weekend. So put your feet up, turn off the television, and read.

"In the grand tradition of Booker T. Washington, author John McWhorter is either a conservative or a sellout, not that there's much of a difference.

Conventional wisdom has it that modern black conservatism has its roots in the philosophy of one Booker T. Washington, the Tuskegee Wizard whose advocacy of self-reliance, thrift, morality and hard work helped him build a respected university, a personal fortune and a political machine the likes of which have not been seen in black America since. But truth be told, given the Sunday-schooled, Southern-born outlook of large segments of black America the phrase 'black conservative' is damn-near redundant. (And a black "compassionate conservative" would, in most quarters, be simply called a liberal.)

The theme of self-reliance, self-respect and hard work run through nearly every major black movement of the 20th century – regardless of political persuasion. But there's a reason why Clarence Thomas is considered conservative in pejorative sense of the term and Louis Farrakhan, who is pro-business, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty (believing it should apply not only to homicide, but rape as well) and condemns "government handouts" is not. That difference being that most people believe Farrakhan – no matter his labyrinthine contradictions and metaphysical snake oil – has some clue to the persistence of racism in America.

With a few notable exceptions, the class of black conservatives is not at the forefront of the conservative debates of foreign policy unilateralism, stem cell research or deficit spending. Rather they're given dominion over a fiefdom of unwashed Negroes whose social maladjustment is to be condemned as consistently, stridently and creatively as possible. And this explains why Bill Cosby's case of racial Tourette's syndrome last April was widely viewed as 'conservative' as opposed to simply mean-spirited and incoherent. On some level, the terms have become synonymous.

Which brings us to our present concern John McWhorter. In the span of three years, since the publication of his initial foray into Negro punditry "Losing the Race" and its follow-up "Authentically Black," McWhorter has become something a negro-con phenomenon, appearing on television and talk shows and writing in numerous outlets. His arguments that blacks are done in by 'victimology' not racism, and that black people are doomed by their own 'separatist' and anti-intellectual tendencies amount to old malt liquor in a new 40-ounce. But no matter, it sells.

With McWhorter's school of conservatives we hear strains of Booker T. not so much in his views on thrift and hard work – because those are articles of faith across and political lines in the black community – but in his tradition of accomodationism and comically "putting on" for his (predominantly white) audience. Think about this in the context of McWhorter's obsessive concern – 'proving' that there really isn't much racism left in the country and you suspect that his books serve – intentionally or not – as balm for the white guilty conscience. The message to black folk: what you think is racism is actually just coincidental occurrence. Change to song: We have overcome. We just didn't notice.

Central to his indictment of black America on charges of self-sabotage is the idea that liberal soft-heartedness has made black mediocrity pay off. (He asserts that black students don't work hard, knowing that paternalistic white liberals will let them into the best universities anyway.) A mentor of mine once pointed out that there would be 'equality' in America when a black person could be completely mediocre and still achieve astounding success. The point is that among the many pernicious side effects of segregation was its ability to hide white underachievement from black people.

McWhorter indicts universities that consider race as a factor in admissions, but paradoxically has no problem with police using race as a factor in profiling random citizens. After being stopped and questioned by police for walking while black, McWhorter reports in 'Losing the Race,' 'I cannot say that I walked away from that episode furious that I had just been swiped by the long arm of white racism ... I felt that what had happened was a sign that the black underclass is America's greatest injustice, and that I ought to take it as a call to action to do as much as I can to help rescue the underclass so that such encounters with the police won't be necessary – because under the current conditions, whether we like it or not, they are.' "

Read the rest here.

Please don't send any perishables.

"... nappy-headed hos"?

I know I am late to this party, (this is why I hate to be out of the fields even for a minute) but I must comment on the latest little...ahem ahem, racial problem facing America, compliments of famed radio shock jock, Dom Imus.

Let me begin by thanking my girl "i am not star jones" for blogging about this story last week, and being the first to bring it to my attention. This is what I love about the "blackosphere", it helps to push a story so fast.

Now quite a few people will not like this post, because I doubt seriously if what I am going to say is the conventional thinking among black folks. But I wouldn't be me if I didn't speak my mind and keep it one hundred with you. Scary as this is going to sound, I actually agree with ...gasp, John McWhorter on this one. This is probably the only time that I will ever agree with home boy, but he is right about this issue. Don Imus is one man who speaks for many, and who represents a type of thinking in this country that us black folks need to simply start ignoring. He could do a thousand Mea culpa's on Reverend Al's radio show, and it will not change what is in his heart. I have been trying to preach on my blog from day one, that you cannot regulate or legislate morality. Don Imus is a racist and a hustler, who speaks to a very wide base, and tells them exactly what they want to hear. He can do this, because they are either too afraid to say it, or, whatever environment they are in, prevents them from doing so. And believe me when I tell you, he and his sidekicks have done quite well for themselves insulting black folks and other minorities.

So let's make no mistake, Imus didn't make his millions because he didn't have an audience. His Schick is quite popular, and his is the number one radio program in many major markets. (What does that tell you about your fellow countrymen?) So as he goes on the latest white man racist apology tour; just remember that his program regularly plays hosts to major politicians and journalist-resident house Negro, Harold Ford, happens to be one of his favorite people in the world- including many of the very people who will be now condemning him for doing what they do privately in public.

But I am sorry, I can't get all bent out of shape over the Imus comments. Why? Because I have come to expect it from his ilk. I refuse to act like the police inspector from Casablanca and be "shocked, shocked", that such racism exists in America. You will start hearing any day now, about other insensitive and racist things Imus and his sidekicks have said in the past, (called the New York Knicks "a bunch of chest pumping pimps", called Ben "Whitehorse" Nelson, Senator from Colorado, "the guy from F troop") and I am sure that you will be shocked, shocked , that this has been going on under your noses all this time. Yeah right, you must not live in the same America that I do. Here is a news flash; this is exactly the type of shit many of these folks sit around and say when your black ass isn't around. So don't get it twisted; all the marching in the world and all the preaching by Jessie and Al won't change that. And we better start getting our shit together among ourselves (yeah some of our own high profile entertainers call our women hoes too) and stop worrying about some racist cowboy from New Mexico, or else we will be hearing allot more of that type of ignorance from politicians and influential thinkers as well.

"I did a bad thing but I am not a bad person"

I am sure you don't think you are Mr. Imus. In fact, given the nature of modern day America when it comes to matter of race; you are quite the norm.