Media News and Opinion on The Huffington Post: "Elisabeth Hasselbeck Cries After Sparring With Whoopi Over The N-Word"
This is a very pain filled show. The AA members of he cast defended the use of the term Nigger by AA basically because, in theor view, they have the right to call themsleves whatever they want.
I call doggy diarhea on that one. The reason non-AA are asked NOT to use the N bomb is because it is offensive. The Black community uses the word in a number of ways but they are all tied to the derogatory use by whites. There is a sort of reverse racism in a Black person bragging that she is a nigger.
I have thought about this in terms of words my own folks onjects to .. Kike, Honkey, etc. It seems clear to me that my AA friends would be at least embarassed if I refered to my self as a Honkey.
Bottom line, for an AA to tell Honkeys that the Hnkey can't call the Black guy a Nigger, is racist!
Friday, July 18, 2008
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Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked.
By Sophia A. Nelson
Sunday, July 20, 2008; B01
There she is -- no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.
It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves.
Welcome to our world.
We've watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails -- being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: "angry black woman." And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated "makeover" to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.
Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it's on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We're endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting -- being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle -- as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother -- can change that.
"Ain't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren't accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman's dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life?
"Thanks to the hip-hop industry," one prominent black female journalist recently said to me, all black women are "deemed 'sexually promiscuous video vixens' not worthy of consideration. If other black women speak up, we're considered angry black women who complain. This society can't even see a woman like Michelle Obama. All it sees is a black woman and attaches stereotypes."
Black women have been mischaracterized and stereotyped since the days of slavery and minstrel shows. In more recent times, they've been portrayed onscreen and in popular culture as either sexually available bed wenches in such shows as the 2000 docudrama "Sally Hemings: An American Scandal," ignorant and foolish servants such as Prissy from "Gone With the Wind" or ever-smiling housekeepers, workhorses who never complain and never tire, like the popular figure of Aunt Jemima.
Even in the 21st century, black women are still bombarded with media and Internet images that portray us as loud, aggressive, violent and often grossly obese and unattractive. Think of the movies "Norbit" or "Big Momma's House," or of the only two black female characters in "Enchanted," an overweight, aggressive traffic cop and an angry divorcée amid all the white princesses.
On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a smart, accomplished black professional woman portrayed on mainstream television or in the movies? If Claire Huxtable on "The Cosby Show" comes to mind, remember that she left the scene 16 years ago.
The reality is that in just a generation, many black women -- who were mostly domestics, schoolteachers or nurses in the post-slavery Jim Crow era -- have become astronauts, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhDs. You name it, and black women have achieved it. The most popular woman on daytime television is Oprah Winfrey. Condoleezza Rice is secretary of state.
And yet my generation of African American women -- we're called, in fact, the Claire Huxtable generation -- hasn't managed to become successfully integrated into American popular culture. We're still looking for respect in the workplace, where, more than anything else, black women feel invisible. It's a term that comes up again and again. "In my profession, white men mentor young whites on how to succeed," a financial executive told me, but "they're either indifferent to or dogmatically document the mistakes black women make. Their indifference is the worst, because it means we're invisible."
As someone who recently left a large law firm to work in the corporate sector, I have to agree. I liked my firm, but I always felt that I had to sink or swim on my own. I didn't get the kind of mentoring that I saw white colleagues, male and female, getting all around me. The firm was actually one of the better ones when it came to diversity, and yet of 600 partners, only five were black women.
A 2007 American Bar Association report titled "Visible Invisibility" describes how black women in the legal profession face the "double burden" of being both black and female, meaning that they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.
Invisibility isn't the only problem. I run an organization dedicated to supporting African American professional women and often run empowerment workshops at various conferences. At a recent such workshop, I asked the participants to list some words that would describe how they believe they're viewed in the workplace and the culture at large. These are the kinds of words that came back: "loud," "angry," "intimidating," "mean," "opinionated," "aggressive," "hard." All painful words. Yet asked to describe themselves, the same women offered gentler terms: "strong," "loving," "dependable," "compassionate."
Where does the disconnect come from? Possibly from the way black women have been forced into roles of strength for decades. "Black women are the original multitaskers of necessity," says one nonprofit executive. "We've perfected it because we've been doing it for so long. But people don't appreciate the skill it requires, and they don't recognize the toll it takes on us as human beings."
For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a significant price in our private and emotional lives. A life of preordained singleness (by chance, not by choice) is fast becoming the plight of alarming numbers of professional black women in America. The fact is that the more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.
Consider these stunning statistics: As of 2007, according to the New York Times, 70 percent of professional black women were unmarried. Black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at age 40. In 2003, Newsweek reported that there are more black women than black men (24 percent to 17 percent) in the professional-managerial class. According to Department of Education statistics cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women earn 67 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71 percent of all master's degrees and 65 percent of all doctoral degrees.
With all the challenges facing professional black women today, we hope that Michelle Obama will defy the negative stereotypes about us. And that, now that a strong professional black woman is center stage, she'll bring to light what we already know: that an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfill her own dreams. The fact that her husband clearly adores Michelle is both refreshing and reassuring to many of us who long to find a good man who will love and appreciate us.
Recently, a friend who's a married professional mother of three girls wrote to me: "I think one of the most interesting things about Michelle Obama is that what she and her husband are doing is pretty revolutionary these days -- and I don't mean running for president. For a black man and woman in the U.S. to be happily married, with children, and working as partners to build a life -- let alone a life of service to others -- all while rearing their children together is downright revolutionary."
It's how so many black professional women feel. And our hope is that if Michelle Obama becomes first lady, the revolution will come to us at last.
snelson@...
Sophia A. Nelson is a corporate attorney and president of iask, Inc., an organization for African American professional women.
The Michelle Obama drama
Candidate's wife must, unfairly, contend with century's worth of racial stereotypes
By Andra Gillespie
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/20/08
I am very thankful not to be in Michelle Obama's shoes right now.
Don't get me wrong, I have a tremendous amount of respect for this lady. Her resume is stellar. Her bearing is regal. And I suspect that she would make a great coffee buddy. But I would not want to have the weight of black womanhood unfairly thrust upon my shoulders just because my husband happened to be making a historic run for president.
By many measures, black women have made tremendous gains in the past 40 years. For example, the proportion of black women over 24 who completed four years of college rocketed from 4.4 percent in 1967 to 19 percent in 2007. Despite such progress, and despite the prominence of such women as Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice, black women still face the indignity of gendered racial stereotypes.
We have been maligned as unattractive and unfeminine. When we are seen as attractive, we are perceived to be excessively promiscuous. We are perceived to be the backbone of black families, but we are also charged with emasculating black men, with having too many children out of wedlock, and with being responsible for the breakdown of the black nuclear family in general. Black women get praised for their perceived assertiveness, but we are constantly maligned for being abrasive and uncooperative.
These stereotypes have been embedded in American popular culture for more than a century. The mammy figure is a fixture of classic American literature and movies and until recently, even greeted us each morning on our pancake boxes and syrup bottles. Sensual black women have been distorted as jezebel temptresses on the big screen and as irresponsible welfare mothers in public policy debates.
The sharp-tongued shrew Sapphire was the lead female character on the first black television show ("Amos 'n Andy"), and she is reincarnated every time a reality television producer edits footage or makes casting decisions to create conflict between a black female cast member and her white co-stars.
Given the long-standing history of such stereotypes against black women, we should not have been surprised that some have tried to paint Michelle Obama as Every Black Female Stereotype, instead of as Everywoman or as the potential first lady that she is.
Mrs. Obama has been called unpatriotic. Fox News refused to acknowledge that she is married and that her children were not born out of wedlock when it referred to her as "Obama's baby mama." There are apocryphal claims that she uses the term "whitey" to malign whites. And now, she is depicted on the cover of the New Yorker magazine in an afro, fatigues and a machine gun as though she is the second coming of Stokely Carmichael or Huey Newton.
In general, a negative depiction of a candidate's spouse is not that big a deal. Candidate spouses are very much like vice presidents. Neither one can really make or break a ticket; the candidate clearly matters most. However, in a year in which a black candidate is a major party nominee for the first time, the conventional rules may not apply.
In many ways, Michelle Obama represents the antithesis of her husband. She cannot escape race the way her husband has tried to escape race. She cannot invoke a white parent or an exotic upbringing to deflect racial anxiety. And because the stereotypes leveled against black women are less visceral (though no less demeaning) than the more brutal stereotypes of black men, they are harder to identify, harder to counter and more likely to be successfully used to cast subconscious doubt about Barack Obama's fitness to be president.
In short, Barack Obama could easily deflect the guilt-by-association charges during the Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres incidents, but it is much harder to escape guilt-by-association when the associate is his wife of 15 years.
Michelle Obama could very well become the human barometer for the impact of racial anxiety on vote choice. As we saw in a New York Times/CBS news poll released last week, blacks and whites agree that America is ready to elect a black president. However, Barack Obama's favorability ratings diverge wildly among blacks and whites. Obama enjoys high favorability ratings among blacks, but more whites have an unfavorable view of Obama than have a favorable view of him. If Michelle Obama continues to be a successful target of racially tinged criticism, then this could have a negative impact on her husband's chance at getting elected.
This is why the New Yorker cover, while perhaps well-intentioned, was ill-advised. The magazine's editors have defended the cover, arguing that it is a satire of the ridiculous charges leveled against the Obamas in recent months. Editors clearly hope that people will look at the cover and realize that the scenario depicted is farcical.
Unfortunately, many people miss the fact that the cover was intended to be a mockery. More than 10 percent of those surveyed for a recent Newsweek poll believe that Barack Obama is a practicing Muslim, despite his campaign's best efforts to dispel such gossip. If people can still believe that rumor, then they can certainly internalize vicious and false smears about Michelle Obama that are rooted in centuries-old stereotypes about black women.
The Obama campaign responded appropriately by attacking the New Yorker cover cartoon immediately. However, the condemnation of the cover could have been more forceful. Much of the media outcry has focused on the religious depiction of Barack Obama or on the general tastelessness of the cartoon.
The Obama campaign would do better to vigorously and explicitly challenge any depiction of Mrs. Obama that is sexist and racist, including this cartoon. It is precisely that type of subtle and insidious attack that could be the Democratic campaign's undoing if it is allowed to fester in the minds of undecided voters. Besides, it is time to bury the negative depictions of black women in popular culture once and for all.
> Next week: Cindy McCain's impact on the campaign
ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff an illustration of Michelle Obama
I think this is an exaggeration. Yes Michelle is CULTURALLY Black. Anyone running for Prexy wo is not CULTURALLY WASP is going to have to put up with this.
Aftr the election, I think we will see a surge of adoption pf AA culturre into the mainstream.
Don't share your enthusiasm.
you do not share my enthusiasm for Obama or for fried clams?
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