Walking the Obama Criticism Tightrope

01 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Blind Faith, Blind Support, Centrists, Eunuchs, Forbidden City, Liberals, Michelle Obama, Obama, Obama Administration, Personality, Policy, Praise, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Rabid Right, Tightrope, White House, White Progressives

Philippe Petit in midst of his high-wire crossing between the Twin Towers, New York City, August 7, 1974. (http://www.talktalk.co.uk).

These are the times in which we live. Where a critique of a phrase, speech, demeanor or policy can leave someone like me on the outs with White progressives or blindly devoted Obama supporters. Or a comment that could be used to paint me as an Uncle Tom and a Black socialist revolutionary at the same time. It’s crazy these days whenever the subject of President Barack Obama, (or Michelle Obama, or the Obama Administration) comes up.

I’ve probably done about thirty blog posts and nearly 1,000 tweets related to the politics and policies of President Obama and his administration over the past five and a half years. Most of them have been positive, or at least hopeful. I genuinely like the man, his wife and his kids, at least from afar, in part as a result of reading his books. My distaste for his centrist political decision-making, for policies that have left the nation stagnant economically, educationally, socially and geopolitically are all well documented here and on Twitter as well.

Yet it’s hard for most people I’ve encountered to separate how they feel about the man and his family and what they think about his presidency and politics. I’ve found myself having to defend my writings about Obama against a tide of rabid far-right Americans. They’re mostly White and male, and mostly making arguments that approach the ravings of psychotic serial killers. Theirs is an imagined President Obama, one who conspired with his mother for the presidency from the womb. One whose policies range from socialist and Kenyan one minute to fascist and Islamic the next. They absolutely refuse to admit they’re ape-shit over this Black guy as POTUS, his Black wife as First Lady, and his Black children living in the White House.

I’m used to the ravings of this lunatic fringe, though. They are a familiar enough sort. The academic version of these folks were the ones who insisted that I was a plagiarist because of the quality of my writing. So when I get their often idiotic ramblings and significantly misspelled, often grammatically incorrect responses, I laugh nervously, knowing that you don’t have to be literate to be dangerous.

Maria Spelterini crossing Niagara Falls on tightrope with feet in peach baskets, July 4, 1876. (George E. Curtis [1830-1910] via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But I also have to deal with two other camps on Obama, one steeped in policy criticism, the other in ecclesiastical praise and worship. Progressives, mostly White (though hardly as exclusive as the rabid right), have been on a rampage about President Obama’s use of executive privilege since day three of his presidency. To be sure, I’ve made many of the same criticisms about the use of drone strikes and the murdering of American citizens (not to mention Pakistani and Yemeni innocents) abroad, about the continued use of Gitmo to hold dozens of folk who have been proven to not be terrorists. Not to mention the Obama Administration’s ineffective use of political capital on the economy, K-12 and higher education, and even healthcare.

Still, my not-as-left-as-me comrades tend to act as if they were clairvoyant about the missteps that the Obama Administration would take and make back in ’08 and early ’09, even though they voted and actively supported his election in the first place.

Yet there’s no group more annoying than Obama’s blind supporters. They are Black and White, but both tend to be elites who think that they’re liberals but are really Clinton-esque centrists. They seem to praise President Obama’s every word, every step and every decision. When there’s a clear-cut issue on which to criticize his administration — such as the huge increase in drone strikes and the sequester agreement of ’11 — they remain as silent as church mice. It’s as if Obama’s White House is the Forbidden City and his army of supporters the eunuchs who run the place, never telling the emperor what he actually needs to hear.

So with any criticism of President Obama or even Michelle Obama comes the insinuation that how dare I beat up on the nation’s first Black president. “He’s doing all that he can, but Congress and the GOP stand in his way,” they often say. Or “leave Michelle alone,” some say, noting her active (yet completely ineffective) efforts to tackle childhood obesity as an example of her grace.

Forbidden City tour, with actors playing emperors, eunuchs and concubines, June 1, 2013. (http://www.newmantours.com).

My last set of comments on Obama came on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, noting their “hard truths” speeches about the plight of African Americans in today’s America, calling for Black graduates of Bowie State University and Morehouse College to take up the mantle of personal responsibility. I said it was the wrong speech for the wrong audience at the wrong time. Except that their audience was really their White supporters watching on TV, not the Black students who already knew too well that mantle.

My tweets brought representatives from all sides out to praise or blast my comments. I was an Uncle Tom one minute, absolutely right the next, and then a socialist making excuses for Black pathologies a minute later. I think the next time I do a post on Obama, I’m riding a unicycle!

All The Media’s Stereotypes

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Dirty Laundry" (1982), 9/11. Jingoism, Boston, Boston Marathon Bombing, Branch Davidian Compound, Breaking News, Centrism, Chechnya, CNN, Cultural Stereotypes, Don Henley, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FOX News, Immigrants, Immigration, Islam, Jihadists, John King, Jonathan Capehart, Lockdown, Media Bias, New York Post, Oklahoma City Bombing, Police Chase, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Stereotypes, Tamerlane Tsarnaev, Terrorism, Terrorized, Waco, Washington Post, West Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion, Xenophobia

Dzhokhar & Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston Marathon crowd moments before bomb blasts, April 15, 2013. (http://www.mirror.co.uk)

The mainstream American media was just one big, almost unbelievable fail this past week. Between the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent hunt for brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the ricin letters to Mississippi GOP politicians and President Obama and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. In the last case, the one that killed and injured more people than two dumb asses in Boston. Yet, somehow, in a world in which the best answer should be “I don’t know” or “We don’t know yet,” media folks and their experts have been tweeting and reporting at the level of gossip for the past five or six days.

Usually a fairly careful journalist/columnist, Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post tweeting three hours after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, “April 19: Anniversary of storming of Branch Davidian compound & the Okla. City bombing.” At that point, we didn’t even know the number of people killed, maimed or injured. Nor did we know the number of bombs that had exploded in Copley Square. Think, man, think!

The more famous comments of the week came out of CNN’s shop, though. John King had breaking news Wednesday afternoon that law enforcement officials had identified a “dark-skinned male” suspect. Being a White guy working in mainstream media means that you never have to say “I’m sorry,” apparently. Especially when all of his “breaking news” reporting turned out to be completely wrong.

Let’s not really analyze the so-called reporting of FOX News or the New York Post. You’d get more truth from a psychic doing a Vulcan mind-meld with Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brain right now than you could from Murdoch’s news media world in a year.

Let’s also not forget many of the so-called terrorism experts whom guessed wrong about race, immigrant status and so many other details this past week. Not to mention reports whom apparently couldn’t find Chechnya on a map if the republic were blown up to 100x normal map size and they put a floodlight on it.

But the most disturbing — yet not very surprising — thing about the past seven days has been how the US media has engaged in a near-endless campaign of racial stereotypes, immigrant stereotypes, terrorism stereotypes, religious stereotypes, patriotism stereotypes, and hyperbole that attempts to defy history. A simple list should help:

Terrorist(s) = Arab Muslims
Males from the Caucasus = Caucasians, but not White
Muslims who commit a violent act = terrorists
Violent criminals = anyone not White (especially Blacks & Latinos)
Violent mass-murdering Whites = mentally disturbed (i.e., NOT terrorists)
Arab Muslims = immigrants, NOT US citizens
Indo-Europeans who are White (phenotypically) & citizens but not born in US = Immigrants
Boston = city terrorized like no city ever before

On this last one, I must put on my academic historian hat. As in — are you kidding me? Anyone ever hear of Boston in the years before and during the American Revolution? Or, in more recent times, the Oklahoma City bombing in ’95, 9/11 and Lower Manhattan, the DC sniper rampage in ’02? Or, if the idea here is that terrorism should only be viewed through the prism of those who feel terrorized, what about poor Blacks on the South Side of Chicago, in SE Washington, DC, or poor Latinos in cities like Albuquerque and Phoenix? Or, for that matter, innocent civilians in Yemen and Pakistan attempting to avoid being among the “collateral damage” caused by our drone wars for terrorist scalps?

And then, there was the need for release, for yelps of relief and cheers of joy over the successful capture of Dzhokhar Tsarneav late Friday evening, with chants of “USA! USA! USA!” included. Of course people should feel relief for the end of a tense situation. But let’s not get carried away with the tide here.

Stereotype quote taken from Annie Murphy Paul article (May 1998) in Psychology Today, January 16, 2011. (http://nwso.net/). In public domain.

We know nothing of motive, but we do know that the police will return to its regularly scheduled racial and socioeconomic profiling in the coming days. We can’t wrap our collective heads around the idea that two assimilated White American immigrants decided to kill runners at the Boston Marathon. Yet we also somehow decided to culturally and legally un-Americanize them — something we didn’t do with Timothy McVeigh. Chants patriotic might be a way to show solidarity, but we refuse to come to grips with the racial/xenophobic and anti-Muslim psychology that comes with these impromptu outbreaks of so-called unity.

Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” remains just as relevant now as his tune about the American news media was three decades ago. Still, the completely centrist and biased, always-concerned-about-the-bottom-line media is a mere reflection of our narcissistic and imperialistic selves.

“They Can Never Kill Enough or Steal Enough…”

18 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture

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1, American Narcissism, Boston Marathon Bombing, Congress, Corporations, Doc Holliday, GOP, Gun Regulation, Johnny Ringo, Metaphor, Murderers, Narcissism, Republicans, Senate, Terrorists, Tombstone (1993), Val Kilmer

Take Doc Holliday’s (as played by Val Kilmer) insightful line about nemesis Johnny Ringo from Tombstone (1993), and it should also reveal something about our fellow crazy and/or well-off Americans as well. We could easily substitute “Congress,” “Conservatives,” “Corporations,” “The top 1%,” “Republicans,” and “Centrists Democrats” at the beginning of “…got a great empty hole right through the middle of them. They can never kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.” For some, they really do want “revenge” for “bein’ born.” Especially in light of the votes against even a watered-down and nearly useless version of gun regulation through background checks in the Senate yesterday, or the fool(s) responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday.

So many sad and narcissistic people in this country — they could literally take my breath away. And with their denial of climate change, that could very well happen, and right soon, too.

Transfer Anniversary

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Politics, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Department of HIstory, Dissertation Completion, Dissertation Funding, Doctoral Completion, Elite Universities, Elitism, Funding, History Department, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter, John Modell, Jr., Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Academia, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Viewing Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon’s mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

March ’93 was an interesting month for me, to say the least. Just about the biggest thing happening for me that month was my transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon (or CMU) to finish my doctorate. After nearly two years of grad school in the History Department, I knew I needed to leave. Especially with Larry Glasco as my well-meaning but sometimes absentee advisor and with a bunch of professors who never hid their disdain for me as a masters and then a doctoral student. I’d also been at Pitt for six years between undergrad and grad school, most of those focused on history, Black Studies, or education foundations and policy as areas of research.

I knew that Carnegie Mellon wasn’t an ideal situation. I was sure that had I desired, I could’ve applied to and been accepted by doctoral programs as far and wide as NYU, University of Maryland, University of Michigan and other places. All were places where history didn’t simply consist of working-class historians who believed in the supremacy of class and neo-Marxism above all else – race and racism be damned! What I didn’t know, though, was whether those departments would accept my doctoral credits, cutting my coursework time in half. What I couldn’t be sure about was whether I’d be able to move toward PhD comprehensives and my dissertation proposal within a year of enrollment.

See, these were the things that Joe Trotter, my eventual advisor and John Modell, the graduate coordinator for the department, had promised me as part of my deal for transferring across the bridge to CMU. Those promises, along with the idea of working with an enthusiastic professor whose research didn’t seem out-of-date in a department that seemed to fast-track its students toward doctoral completion. That really appealed to me at the time.

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

When I finally broke it to Larry at the beginning of March that I’d made this decision, he didn’t exactly try to convince me to stay. I think he knew why. An audit of the program in ’98 confirmed officially what I had learned anecdotally over my six years at Pitt. That there were students in the program who’d been ABD (All But Dissertation) since Nixon and Watergate. That fully half of my cohort from ’91 hadn’t even completed their master’s degrees, and only three of us (counting myself) out of twenty-one would ever go on to complete our doctorates. That no Pitt History grad student had obtained substantial research funding from outside the university since my Mom potty-trained me back in ’72-’73. And that politically, the powers that used to be in the department didn’t take my or Larry’s work with me seriously. Even if Larry didn’t see that, I sure did.

Off then, I went. Into the unknown known of CMU, conservative, elite and elitist, not sure if I’d ever be comfortable on the lily-White and honorary-White-as-Asian campus. Still, I reminded myself that Pitt was really only a couple of blocks away at the closest point between the two campuses, that I still had lots of friends and acquaintances there. I also knew, though, that my relationship with Trotter as my advisor would be crucial to my successful navigation of this drab and stuffy world. Too bad I wasn’t clairvoyant!

The Emotional, The Personal and Black History

01 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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A Lynching in Marion, African American History, Anger, Black History, Black History Month, Carnegie Mellon University, Comparative Slavery, Emotions, Fear, Fogel and Engerman, Grief, Indiana (1995), Irony, Jim Crow, Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Learning, Lynching, Pitt, Racism, Rage, Roots (1977), Sarcasm, Seymore Drescher, Slavery, Students, Sy Drescher, Teaching and Learning, Time on the Cross (1974), UMUC, University of Pittsburgh

Black History Month 2013 electronic poster, February 1, 2013. (http://dclibrary.org).

After all of these years — and thirty-seven years’ worth of Black History Months — I sometimes forget how emotionally charged Black history can be. After all, I’m an academically trained historian, one whose emotional range varies from sarcastic to ironic with most things US, World and African American history. But ever so often, I’m reminded by my students about the sadness and pain involved in learning history. I surprise myself sometimes at how passionate or angry I can become in revisiting a piece of history that I otherwise would show no emotion for on most days.

Black history, though, can bring out both the water works and the daggered eyes. My African American history students at Carnegie Mellon University surprised me one day in October ’96 during a discussion I tried to have about lynching and the KKK. It was based on the Indiana PBS documentary, A Lynching in Marion, Indiana, about the lynching of two Black men and the almost lynching of a young Black male for allegedly killing and robbing a White male and raping a young White female in 1930.

The forty-five minute documentary showed clips of defaced and emasculated Black men hung from trees, beaten beyond recognition and even burned postmortem. It also showed films of KKK rallies in the 1920s and early 1930s Indianapolis and other towns in the state, as well as pictures from the Marion lynching itself. The young Black man in Marion, one James Cameron, was only saved from lynching because a member of White mob actually protected him. It turned out, per usual, that the alleged murder and rape was a false accusation, but Cameron still had to spend four years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, IN, August 7, 1930. (Lawrence H. Beitler). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as It is the only image known to depict this hanging, and is used here to illustrate the event.

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, IN, August 7, 1930. (Lawrence H. Beitler via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as It is the only image known to depict this hanging, and is used here to illustrate the event.

My students could barely speak to me or each other after the film, much less be part of a dispassionate discussion of the film. My Black students were tearful and angry, and my White students were pale and scared. I let them express their emotions for about ten minutes, but waited until the next class to draw out a more comprehensive discussion. As this was the first standalone class I’d taught as an adjunct professor, I was a bit unprepared for the how emotional my students became, how personally they took the film and its content.

But I should’ve been better prepared, especially given my own emotions about Black and other histories over the years. I remember the first time I watched Roots, along with millions of other Americans, in February ’77. I cried or was stunned that whole week. Twelve years later, in my undergraduate readings seminar for History majors at Pitt, I found myself angry with my classmates. My eventual first graduate advisor Larry Glasco was leading a discussion on slavery and the Middle Passage. I didn’t know why, but I was angry that whole class. It wasn’t just a knee-jerk anger. It was a low-heat rage, beyond anything my idiotic classmates were saying about slavery in the eventual US not being as brutal as slavery in the Caribbean or Brazil.

The following semester, I took my first graduate course as a Pitt junior, Comparative Slavery with Sy Drescher. We got into a discussion of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), a study in which the authors tried to show scientifically that slavery wasn’t as bad for Africans in the US as it was for Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil. Using records from one plantation, Fogel and Engerman tried to show that since few slaves were whipped, that therefore slavery wasn’t brutal for my African ancestors. I was pissed when some of the grad students in my class defended Time on the Cross idea that 1,800 calories a day was sufficient for the average slave. It pissed me off so much that I had to leave the seminar room for five minutes to make sure I didn’t punch someone.

Me really pissed, at CMU PhD graduation, Pittsburgh, PA, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

I see some of this in my UMUC students sometimes. Students who turn every issue in US history into a referendum on race. “Immigrants exploited? Well, not compared to African Americans as sharecroppers!” Or “Jim Crow was really a second slavery,” some of my students have said emphatically, as if Blacks did nothing during Reconstruction or Jim Crow to make their lives better. They feel, and rightfully so for the most part, that Blacks have gotten a raw deal throughout American history, and that it is my job to expose the hypocrisy of racism in every lecture and discussion.

It’s emotional and it’s personal. But it’s also historical, which means not so much putting emotions or personal investment aside as much as it does putting these emotions and personal investments in perspective. I’ve never been dispassionate about history – I’ve just learned how to use my New York-style sarcasm to hide my passion pretty well.

Glad Obama’s In, But Nothing to Celebrate

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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Capitulation, Centrist, Compromise, Domestic Policies, foreign policy, Glenn Greenwald, Great Recession, Inauguration, Inauguration Day, Long-Term Unemployment, Mitt Romney, National Security, Obama, Obama Administration, Obama's Legacy, Obama's Second Term, Police State, Policies, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Privatization, Rhetoric, Second Inauguration, Wall Street Deregulation

President Barack Obama takes his first oath of office, US Capitol, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly supported President Barack Obama for election in ’08 and again in ’12, as my blog posts and my thousands of tweets show over the past five years. I’ve admonished neo-cons, naysayers, liberals and racists on my pages over the past half-decade for their ridiculous statements about the president’s ancestry, motivations and policies.

But, even with all of this, I’ve gleaned flaws in President Obama’s approach to domestic and foreign policy, to his administration’s continuing Bush’s work on the semi-police state, to his whole-cloth acceptance of K-12 education “reform” and backing off on regulations for the for-profit higher education institution world (see my posts “Can Do No Wrong” [March ’10], “Bad Conversations and Education Reform” [November ’10], “The POTUS and The Last Airbender” [December ’10], “For the Love of a Lockout & an Impasse” [July ’11], “Emancipation and Compromise” [this month] and “Why Obama Is Only A Failed Centrist President” [this month]).

The recent fiscal cliff solution, the extension of widespread surveillance powers over our email, cell phone calls, text messages (and, presumably, blogs, tweets and Facebook pages like my own as well), and the ho-hum approval of $633 billion in appropriations for the Defense Department’s budget this year, though, give me even less of a reason to celebrate President Obama’s second inauguration.

Crowd at National Mall morning of President Obama’s inauguration, January 20, 2009. (DoD photo by Senior Master Sgt. Thomas Meneguin, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Without a doubt, he was a better choice than that dumb-ass sycophant Mitt Romney. If only because Romney’s entire raison d’être as president would’ve been to allow the rich and corporations another round of economic rape, destroying the American middle class, and pushing the working poor and welfare poor into oblivion in the process.

Obama’s win in November, however, was a sigh of relief for me, not really a jumping-for-joy moment. Now, after witnessing the fiscal cliff debacle, it is obvious that the next four years will be more of the same lukewarm, milk-toast domestic proposals, hardline national security and military policies, and half-baked rhetoric that we were all a part of in President Obama’s first term. By 2017, if I’m still alive to write and tweet, here’s what will remain before us as major crises when Obama leaves office:

National debt; universal health care reform; higher education reform; student aid; student loan policy; minimum wage; living wage; union-busting; long-term unemployment; long-term underemployment; de-industrialization; Wall Street/banking deregulation; housing/mortgage crisis; comprehensive immigration reform; federal tax code; rendition and torture; warrantless wiretapping/surveillance; drone strikes on innocent civilians; upgrading the electrical grid; crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, water and sewage systems); PreK-12 education reform; social mobility; green jobs; environmental pollution; cap-and-trade; global warming/climate change; nuclear proliferation; Medicare/Medicaid solvency; religious tolerance; racial/ethnic tensions; women’s reproductive rights; over-incarceration of poor men and women of color; police brutality; gun violence; violent crimes; domestic terrorism; cybersecurity; military-industrial complex; racial/gender/age/sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace; school privatization/high-stakes testing/charter schools/voucher programs; border security, the War on Drugs, prison-industrial complex; voter disenfranchisement; decriminalization of marijuana (and other drugs); post-trauma stress disorder for war veterans and the poor; lingering effects of the Great Recession; funding for public mental health facilities; high-speed rail; food security and policy; prescription drug abuse; Big Pharma; Social Security “reform;” obesity/diabetes/high-blood pressure and other long-term illnesses; and GMOs.

Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey coast taken during a search and rescue mission, October 30, 2012. (Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Aerial views of Hurricane Sandy damage, New Jersey coast [climate change as example of crises that will go unaddressed during Obama’s second term], October 30, 2012. (Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen, USAF/Wikipedia). In public domain.

Now, you tell me. Do I really have any reason to see today as a day of celebration?

The Falsehoods of a Civil Rights Movement Legacy

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Birthday, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Movement, Class Divide, Educational Aspirations, Estelle Abel, Generation X, Generation Y, Generational Divide, Generational Prejudice, Legacy, Martin Luther King Jr., Mythology, Myths, Police Brutality, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Poverty, Racism, Stop and Frisk

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial statue, National Parks Service, Washington, DC, August 2, 2012. (NPS via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as this is a 2D picture of a 3D sculpture.

Well, it’s not officially Martin Luther King Day yet, but since Dr. King was actually born on January 15, 1929, better for me to talk about him today than next week. Especially with President Obama’s second inaugural going on at the same time. But what a legacy! Yet his generation of civil rights activists and righteous protesters have done as much harm to his legacy as have conservatives invoking his “I Have a Dream” speech every time they’re called out on their bigotry.

Yeah, that’s right, I said it! One of the benefits — if you want to call it that — of being born in ’69 is that I’ve witnessed the devolution of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders and followers into a gauntlet of gatekeepers who expect everyone from my generation to start every sentence paying homage to their sacrifices. I have no problems with that, at least in theory. But the reality is that most folks from the Civil Rights generation — at least the successful ones — made few if any sacrifices for “the cause.” They were in the right place at the right time with the right education and managed to find jobs, careers and positions of influence while the least fortunate of us all saw few material or psychological benefits from Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

I’ve already talked at length about Estelle Abel, a former Mount Vernon High School Science Department chair (see my posts “My Last Day” from June ’11 and “In-Abel-ed” from June ’12 for much more). Her soliloquy about sacrifice and the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make me feel bad about letting Black Mount Vernon, New York down because I only graduated fourteenth in my class out of over five hundred students. There are others, former and current teachers, professors, librarians, politicians, writers, producers, editors, pastors, politicians, bosses and charlatans who’ve made a point to discuss their elitist notions of the Civil Rights Movement and generation with me.

Hundreds of thousands descended on Washington, DC's Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines' Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Hundreds of thousands descend on Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963. (Marines’ Photo via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But most — if not all — of these folks are wrong about their glorified view of the Movement and its legacy four and a half decades later. For college educated, middle class African Americans, life has gotten better, even with bigotry, glass ceilings, DWB, a less stable economy, and the conservative backlash that has gone on unabated since the three years before Dr. King’s assassination. For Blacks not as fortunate, almost nothing has changed, at least not for the better.

Some of it, to be sure (and to cut Bill Cosby some slack), is because of individual choices and poor decision-making. Folks, however, can rarely make decisions outside of their own context and circumstances — think outside of the box, in other words — without a significant amount of help. Poverty in all of its forms is just as grinding now as it was a half-century ago. To expect people from the generations since Dr. King to suddenly forget their poverty, abuse, neglect and exploitation and give praise to a generation where many but far from most made sacrifices for the Movement is ludicrous.

I’m certain that had Dr. King lived over the past forty-five years, he wouldn’t have stood by to allow his generation to constantly criticize the under-forty-five as slackers and immature and unfocused, as folks more concerned with money than equality. King likely would’ve made the point that the post-Civil Rights Generations X and Y are merely a reflection of their upbringing, of their parents and teachers and mentors’ nurturing and training. He would’ve made the same point that others from his generation like the late law professor and scholar-activist Derrick Bell has made over the years. That fighting racism, educational neglect and economic exploitation requires more tools than the moral high-ground, protests, marches, a sympathetic media and obvious redneck tactics. The Movement is itself a shifting terrain that requires new tools and tactics to achieve small victories over a long period of time, longer than most folks from the era are willing to admit.

I actually don’t have a strong ax to grind against the Civil Rights generation. Without folks like Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers or Ella Baker, I wouldn’t have found myself in a gifted-track program in middle school or high school in the ’80s. But let’s not act as if my life was a walk in the park. The legacy of the Civil Rights era never stopped a fist from being thrown into my face by my now ex-stepfather. It never kept us from going on welfare or kept two of my siblings from bring diagnosed as mentally retarded.

NYPD Stop and Frisk caption (actual details for photo unknown), August 2012. (http://thinkprogress.org).

Nor did the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy stop teachers and professors from putting up barriers to my success as a student or employers from putting up a glass ceiling in an attempt to slow my career advance. It never stopped me from being followed and frisked by police or harassed by overzealous security guards. It’s never paid one of my bills, kept food on my plate or kept me from experiencing homelessness. It’s never even been a source of pride, because that would mean that the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy would belong to me as much as it does to the people who allegedly marched with Dr. King.

I can’t wait for those who cling almost in desperation to the idyllic legacy of Dr. King and the cause to retire and fade away, for the ’60s to truly be over. Maybe that’s when folks from the post-’60s generation — folks like me who care about economic and educational equity, social justice and spiritual transformation — will be able to make an impact on our nation’s sorry state of consciousness without pouring libations to folks who gave up on Dr. King’s work ages ago.