The Republic of T.

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the Republican party in the run-up to 2012. First, the party had a literal embarrassment of riches, in the form of a field chock-full of candidates with something for just about every major faction and minor fringe the GOP has cobbled into a conservative coalition. Then, dragged through a series of debates in which the only thing more embarrassing than the candidates was the audience, the candidates who were bona fide right-wing stars, wilted under hot lights of ever intensifying media and public scrutiny.

Inevitably, the field narrowed. Herman Cain went home to (finally) spend more time with his family. Michelle Bachmann has been asked to drop out — again. Rick Perry is still around, but merely provides comic relief at this point. Yet that hasn’t improved the field. Even Newt Gingrich’s ironic return to relevance as the Republicans’ savior seems to be winding down. Meanwhile, the all important Iowa Caucuses loom. And all eyes turn to Ron Paul — the GOP’s own Mad Doctor.

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It’s rare that two very public implosions occur almost simultaneously or resonate so well with one another as the the crashing and burning of Herman Cain’s presidential campaign and Eddie Long’s marriage and ministry. It’s even rarer that two high profile “players” like Cain and Long (or Long and Cain, or even Long/Cain, if you prefer) have the bluffs called so spectacularly and fold so publicly.

For a blogger, it’s difficult to resist either story, considering “how snide and vicious” one could get “and still write nothing but the truth.” For one such as myself, who’s written about both men, it’s impossible to resist.

Some of the parallels between the two are innocuous: both are black ministers, both are from Georgia, both have amassed significant amounts of personal wealth. Other parallels are innocuous: both, if the allegations against them are true, rose to fame pretending to be something they were not, and both were publicly revealed as frauds.

Ironically, in the long run, neither may suffer much for it.

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One breakout session at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, DC, October 3-4, addresses an issue that has major implications for the progressive agenda in 2012 and beyond: "Voter Suppression and the 2012 Election: The Civil Rights Movement to Take Back the Right to Vote." In dozens of states, Republicans are aiming to restrict or take away the voting rights of core constituencies of the Democratic party.

When the tea party shouts their desire to take "their country" back, make no mistake the first thing they want to take back is the right to vote. They don’t just want to take it back. They want to transform it, again.

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Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light

~ “Run On (For A Long Time)”

The last line in the quote above is one my mother repeated often when I was growing up. She meant that those things we tried to hide, out of shame or deceit, would be found out eventually. Thus, it behooved us to live honest lives, with nothing “done in the dark” that we feared would come into the light.

My mother’s phrase came to mind this weekend, as I caught up on the sexual misconduct allegations against Eddie Long, minister of a black mega-church in the Atlanta area.

Spencer LaGrande, 22, filed suit against Long and his New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and, like the other three alleged victims, accused the powerhouse pastor of forcing him into a sexual relationship while treating him to trips around the world, travel in private planes and stays in luxury hotels.

…LaGrande’s lawsuit alleges he met Long in March 2003 during the very first service at a branch Long’s Georgia-based church that opened in a suburb of Charlotte, N.C.

LeGrande said Long agreed to be a father figure for him because his own father was an absentee father, according to court documents, and that Long began asking LaGrande to call him “dad.”

LaGrande was 17 when, according to the lawsuit, Long first made sexual contact with him during a trip to Nairobi, Kenya. The lawsuit alleges several more instances of sexual contact, both before and after LaGrande graduated from high school.

Long’s accusers have said they believe the bishop abused more young men that eventually will come forward. Many people at the church knew what was going on but covered for Long, victims claimed.

Maurice Robinson and Anthony Flagg were the first two accusers, followed a short time later by Jamal Parris.

Parris alleged in the documents, obtained by ABC News, that the bishop would request he be nude while in his presence and would request “sexual massages” and “oral sodomy” when they traveled.

Eddie Long would probably say that my life — a suburban life, with a husband and two children — is one lived in darkness. He would probably invite me to live in the “light.” That is, the “light” as he defines it.

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(If They Could Turn Back Time, Pt. 2)

When I heard Rand Paul’s statement about the civil rights act, I had a sense of deja vu. Not only that I’d heard them before, but that I run into the peculiar conservative phenomenon they represented: wanting have it both ways on an issue when conservative “values” are “repulsive to the mainstream,” and to most people’s sense of decency. It usually happens when they’re caught saying what they mean, and then claim to have been misunderstood, “taken out of context,” or merely speaking in a “hypothetical” sense.

Until Rand Paul though, I’d only ever heard it spoken aloud on the subject of marriage equality. At the time, it was Sen. John McCain’s response to a question about marriage equality, saying that he was fine with same-sex couples having “private ceremonies” but against marriage equality.

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Tim Wise says what I was thinking a few weeks ago: What if the tea party was black?

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters – the black protesters – spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Actually, a coworker and I played that game a week ago. when hundreds of gun activists came to D.C.

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The first time I heard it, I did a double-take, because I thought I heard it wrong. The second time I heard it, I rolled my eyes. The third time I heard Sarah Palin, in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, suggest that women who choose to terminate pregnancies are essentially “taking the easy way out.”

There is much — so much, really — that I object to here, but I’ll start with one really simple point.

I don’t know, and can’t know, what it’s like to decide whether or not to have an abortion. But I can listen — and have listened — to the voices and experiences of women who have. None of the women I’ve known who have faced that choice, based on what they told me, experienced it as an “easy” choice.

Such choices — the ones that have unknown and unknowable, long-term consequences for ourselves and our families — are almost never easy choices to make. As both Republicans and Democrats demonstrate, it’s the choices we make for other people — people who are not “us” — that are the easy choices.

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Michelle Bachman’s “Superbowl of Freedom” (or “Bachmannalia”) was not the first protest with such attention grabbing signage, but merely the latest. September saw Glenn Beck’s 9/12 marchers descent upon Washington. Again, they brought their message-bearing signs and posters.

And their signs made their message and motivation clear. (more…)

I’ve used this quote (attributed to Maya Angelou) before: “When people show you who they really are, believe them.” I guess in periods of tremendous change people really reveal who they really are. I’ll return to this in more detail post, but the news and debate leading up to and following the passage of health care reform in the House is at least worth a quick roundup, if only because how it all comes together in a clear context.

First, let me reiterate that I’ll be the first to say that the anger directed at the president, Congress, and the policy changes they’re trying to make are not entirely rooted in racism, but have deep roots in the economic consequences of the last few decades for the people in some of the reddest states. That said, it’s becoming impossible to ignore that a significant amount is also rooted in the racism and ethnocentrism conservatives have used to divert their constituents’ attention — and rage — towards more convevient targets.

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Mike Elk couldn’t have been more right in his thinking about what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have thought of the Teabaggers, Birthers, etc. He would have seen that those faces that at first glance seem twisted in anger are really twisted in pain. He would recognize those faces as well as the source of the fear and anger distorting them.

It’s not about adopting their politics, compromising our own, or even tolerating their tactics. It’s about reclaiming “We” — The same “We” that Dr. King and civil rights workers sang about, and that I remember singing about myself in church, on the occasions when we sang “We Shall Overcome.”

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A few years ago, when we still had time for such things, my husband and I belonged to a book group. One of the last books the group read before it’s leader moved away (and, having become a first-time parent that year, I declined to be in charge of much else besides keeping myself in relatively clean clothes) sparked an exchange between me and my husband that came to mind as I watched the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings.

The book was Middlesex (a delightful read), and in one chapter the protagonist’s family of Greek immigrants shopped for a new home. They encountered a real estate agent who asked how many relatives lived with them, and subtly directed them toward certain neighborhoods and away from one — where "ethnics" like themselves would "not fit in."

It hit me like a slap in the face. It sounded familiar, but different. To me, this fictional family was white. But in the time and place they occupied on the page they weren’t "white enough."

"Oh my God!" I exclaimed. My husband, who was reading the same book, looked at me.

I looked up from the page, looked at him, and said with a note of wonder in my voice, "There are different shades of white."

"Yes," the son-of-Polish-immigrants I married said, dryly. "There are."

Or at least there were. From the moment Judge Sotomayor’s nomination was announced, it’s become more and more evident that all those varied shades of white have since blended into a much paler, but more uniform, shade.

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Henry Louis Gates and I are very different people. He is a Harvard Professor. The closest I got to the Ivy League was a weekend visit to Yale. He is a successful author. I am a blogger whose aspirations may outstrip his abilities. He is world renowned. I am, well, not. He is, most definitely, far more knowledgeable about a great many things than I am. Of that I’m sure.

However, we have two things in common. We are both black men. As such, though he’s a college professor and I’m long out of college, we are both perpetually enrolled in the same course.

It’s called Black Man – 101.

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I was probably an annoying person to have around if you were watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. I was so frustrated listening to them that I couldn’t help … um … talking back to the television. There is, after all, only so much the mind can take before it explodes.

At least, that’s true of my mind. As for the minds of some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, last week was like a crash course of what I’ve often referred to as "self-evasion of the mind."

It was some time before I recognized “self evasion of the mind” as the act of contorting the mind so as not to have to see or acknowledge what is obvious to anyone who simply looks.

It’s a phrase I learned from an admired college professor, and I’ve since expanded my understand of it to include contorting the mind in order that one may continue to hold conflicting views or beliefs, or engage in behavior that is diametrically opposed to your stated beliefs.

Basically, it’s amounts to working very hard at not having a clue. Or, in the case of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, working overtime at not having a clue.

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I started researching the murder of Simmie Williams back in August, around the same time I began researching the murder of Lawrence King. I started researching King’s story because of the Newsweek article about his murder that came out in July, and there was a lot of controversy around it. I starting researching Simmie William’s murder because the similarities with King (gay youth, of color, non-gender conforming, etc.) and the reality that —though his murder happened little more than a week after King’s — William’s murder got far less attention.

Maybe it was because of race, maybe it was because of the difference in age between him and King, whose murder has arguably received the most attention since Matthew Shepard. But, then, that’s no different from any number of anti-LGBT hate crimes that rarely make headlines outside of the communities where they occur. Memorials are held, sometimes vigils on the murder site or where the body was found or outside of hospitals. Local groups organize. Sometimes a suspect is caught, and even tried and convicted.

But most of the rest of the world never hears.

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If nothing else, this election revealed how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

Yes, there’s the irony of celebrating the historic election of Barak Obama while simultaneously mourning the passage of Proposition 8 and the other anti-gay ballot initiatives in Florida, Oklahoma, and Arizona. But this started way before November 4th. It started, this time, with a decision — conscious or not — by the McCain campaign to play to the basest of its base.

I said to myself at the time that, whether McCain won or lost, there would be a price for that tactic; one that John McCain would be among the last to ever have to pay. As president, there would have been no way he could have united the country. And even in the aftermath of his loss, we will continue to live with the belligerent bigotry and racism he and his running mate stirred up from their bottom-of-the-barrel base.

The evidence? The rise in hate crimes in the wake of the election.

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There’s a look that Black men of a certain age have. It is somewhat akin to the “thousand mile stare” of war veterans. It may be tinged with anything from sorrow to determination. It is usually accompanied by a silence that is usually best left uninterrupted, except by those who know what it holds back, know when the dam is about to burst, and know how to stop it from bursting in that particular man. Right then.

Anyone who knows that look, knows that stare, and knows that silence, knows that it holds back—and sometimes just barely—a tidal wave of anger and frustration. It is a look that says not only “I’m sick of this shit,” but “I’m sick of fighting this shit.” And it it most often worn by one who is—and has long been— waist deep in “this shit,” and fighting to get to the other side.

Joseph Beam captured the essence of it, and put his own spin on it, when he wrote:

I, too, know anger. My body contains as much anger as water. It is the material from which I have built my house; blood red bricks that cry in the rain. It is what pulls my tie and gold chains taut around my neck; fills my penny loafers and my Nikes; molds my Cavlins and gray flannels to my torso. It is the face and posture I show the world. It is the way, sometimes the only way, I am granted an audience.

My father had that look sometimes. I’ve seen it on the faces of other men in my family, as well as teacher, preachers, deacons, and just about anybody old enough to “remember when.” James Booker remembers when, and james Booker has that look.
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I know I’m all kinds of late with this. (Gimme a break. I’ve got a newborn in the house. It’s either a miracle or a sign of serious addiction that I’m blogging at all.) And he’s not my first choice as a candidate. But, damn.

Even if he doesn’t win the nomination or the oval office, Thursday night Barack Obama stepped into history, and basically took the rest of the country with him.

Someone asked a co-worker of mine yesterday, “Did you ever think you’d live to see the day?” Well, I was pretty sure I would. (And will.) But last night was a pleasant surprise, not to mention inspiring.

Like I said, he’s not my first choice as a candidate, but I can see what draws people to support him.