Bubba in the Backyard: The Politics of Race and Gender in Campaign 2008

Let me locate for you the space from which I am speaking. During slavery, a Black man’s desire to make a strike for freedom was often rationalized and even seriously argued in the courts, as some sort of mental disorder or disease. ‘What in the world could be much better than what they have here?’ They would say. After slavery, white men cowardly came to project the almost Jack-the Ripper-like attention they had once wantonly displayed toward Black women’s bodies, on to the Black male. From this moment on, as the nation was once again on the brink of remaking itself, suddenly ingrained into the substance of American culture, and constantly re-enforced through ritual play, down on through that vicious period in which Coalhouse Walker endeavored to play jazz and raise a family, roughly a century ago, when conservative newspapers like the Atlanta Journal Constitution basically poised as bulletin boards directing the latest surge of white bloodlust running rampant and unchecked; until, as recently as the O.J. Simpson trial and the downfall of Mike Tyson, the specter of a brutish Black male rapist violently on the prowl for the chastity of white woman, has been a lucrative commodity for the American corporate media. It is that part of the conversation on race that has been made mute and unspeakable. It is what keeps us from healing and moving on as a nation. It is like the restrained conversation that you sought to have with your child that ended up only helping her to get pregnant far too young in her life.

The Black Candidate

After what had become nearly eight miserable years, whence a stolen election, a terrorist attack, and a devastating alienating war abroad had suddenly thrown open the whole nature of what it actually means to be an American, finally there had emerged a candidate who actually manifested the audacity of hope. It was a brand that spoke to the best in all of us. For his opponents though, the playbook had long ago been written and culturally set in stone, and there remained an ironclad reliance upon the lingering perception of Black racial inferiority. This would continue to linger on a course extant within the malignant zeitgeist of an inadequate and ill advised century of protracted concentrated Civil Rights discourse. Thus for them, quite another political narrative remained aggressively at play.

Obviously, one would have to assume that this elite political intelligentsia (the New Tenth) did not even bother to read either of Barack Obama’s celebrated best selling books; The Audacity of Hope (2006), and Dreams From My Father (1995) where he writes: ‘It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela.’ Later on, he fondly recalls the admonitions of his father saying to him: ‘You do not work hard enough, [Barrack]. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!’ In time of course, ironic as it would seem, it would be Barack Obama who would continue to be accused of just not having a “Black agenda”. However, in both Jessie Jackson’s presidential campaigns (1984, 1988), and in that of Al Sharpton’s (2004) were we not stridently informed: “Just simply being Black and in the presidential race means itself that issues of concern to the Black community shall automatically rise to the surface!” If this is so, then what for them has actually changed in 2008? Why has Barack Obama seemed to raise the cautious ordure of so many of today’s selected, groomed, and often perfectly projected Leading Blacks? The answers may lie not too far from King’s Tomb. Perhaps Memphis was simply no place for him? Doesn’t it all just make you wonder?