Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR:
Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself
by Mark Anthony Neal

So once again technology and the mainstream media have conspired to manufacture a political firestorm regarding another preacher, another sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ and another repudiation from Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Read the Full Essay

from NewsOne.com

Op-Ed
Blame Obama for Oprah's Ratings?
by Mark Anthony Neal

For much of her public life, Oprah Winfrey has stood clear of electoral politics, no doubt, because her audience covers a full range of the political spectrum. Thus Winfrey's public support of Senator Barack Obama and subsequent campaign stops earlier this year, raised more than a few eyebrows. Would Winfrey's foray into politics impact the media empire that she has built? Recent ratings suggest cracks in the Winfrey empire, though it remains to be seen how much can be attributed to public support of Barack Obama.

Reports that The Oprah Winfrey Show has lost some two million viewers over the past few years and that, according to Nielsen Media Research, her audience is down 7% since last fall, could be attributed to a range of factors. Younger audiences, for example, are increasingly drawn to YouTube. Also, after more than 20 years on air, the show might be showing natural audience fatigue. The same explanations could be made for Winfrey's O Magazine, whose circulation is down 10% over the past few years. But ours is not an ordinary historical moment.

Winfrey's unprecedented move to support Obama has to be factored into the erosion of her popularity. A specific source of the backlash can be attributed to legions of middle-aged white women who are dismayed that the icon chose to support Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton. Part of their reaction speaks to the fact that for many in Winfrey's core audience, gender overshadows her racial identity.

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Also: Gallery--When Celebs Get Political

Single Black Female Opens @ The Duke

You are invited to the limited Off-Broadway return engagement of

Lisa Thompson's SINGLE BLACK FEMALE

Directed by Colman Domingo

The comedy “Single Black Female” stars Soara-Joye Ross (“Jerry Springer: The Opera” at Carnegie Hall, “Dessa Rose” at Lincoln Center, “Dance of the Vampires” on Broadway) and Riddick Marie (“A House with No Walls” at New Repertory Theatre, “Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera). Director Colman Domingo, whose acting credits include “Well” and the Tony nominated
“Passing Strange” on Broadway, has directed productions at Geva Theatre and the Tony Award-winning Berkeley Rep.

The Duke on 42nd Street
229 West 42nd Street (between Broadway & Eighth Ave)

Tickets are $30 for all seats, all performances
For tickets call 646-223-3010
Box office walk up T-F 4-7 pm, Sat 12-6 pm

Running Schedule: June 10 - June 29, 2008
Tuesday- Saturday at 8:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday at 2:00 PM

***

The New York Times- Theater Review
June 20, 2006

Brainy Black Women, Still Looking for Love, in 'Single Black Female'
By Anita Gates

Lisa B. Thompson doesn't think much of that old comment about a woman in her 40's' having a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of marrying. If that woman is black and has a college degree, Ms. Thompson has a character say in "Single Black Female," she's more likely to be struck by a meteor.

The play, having its New York premiere at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, is a socially significant and very entertaining two-woman show that manages to be simultaneously self-deprecating and proud. Soara-Joye Ross and Riddick Marie play a variety of characters in 15 scenes illustrating the imperfect lives of educated, middle-class, single African-American women.

They discuss which white men they would consider dating: Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Sting make the list. They have come up with the perfect reply to relatives who ask when they are going to get married: "Well, Aunt Ernestine, I'm just being a patient and obedient Christian. Whenever the Lord sees fit to bless me with a God-fearin' husband, I guess I'll plan my wedding day."

They devise the perfect Internet dating profile: "New York mind, L.A. face, Oakland booty, Vineyard trust fund." One woman brags about her workout routine, but the other challenges her: "Heifer, you do not swim. That thing is called a whirlpool."

The commentary gets off to an unpromising start, though, with a litany of brand names preferred by the single black woman. Ms. Ross and Ms. Marie seem a bit stiff at first too, but they soon loosen up, as does the material. The evening's first big laugh goes to the mention of the kind of man who would hear the words "pinot blanc" and think they referred to a light-skinned Filipino.

"Single Black Female," directed by Colman Domingo, has a few serious moments and slides into them gracefully. And there are serious issues underneath much of the humor. As the play points out, so many women have chosen to better themselves by going to college and building great
careers, "and Tiger Woods marries a nanny."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Walton Muyumba on Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia

from studio-walton muyumba

Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia
by Walton Muyumba

Recently the late author, Norman Mailer came to mind as I sat considering the machinations of whiteness and masculinity in American life. In 2003 Mailer, one of America's most famous white men and "white Negroes," predicted our current national condition of manifold social, political and economic decline in his acerbic essay "The White Man Unburdened." Though many of his critiques of African Americans and women foundered as dubious (if not plain wrong), Mailer was always a reliable critic of white American masculinity.

In an effort to analyze our wanton and exuberant Iraq war-lust, Mailer points to our craven desire for manipulated and televised displays of dominance as a major factor for the drive to the military invasion of Baghdad. But behind what Mailer calls the "Advertising Science"'s trumpeting the war was a "minor but significant" effort to charge the enthusiasm of white American men, raising them again to the top of the national social order. Understanding that conservative white men had taken "a daily drubbing" from feminists and the women's movement, while also losing their stake in major professional sports to black male genius, Tiger included, Bush, Mailer argues, played to their addiction to victory by using "sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag" in order to develop "many psychic connections with the military." According to Mailer, what Bush has always counted on is that "if we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology," because, at least, "we knew we were likely to be good at [war]."

Read the Full Essay

***

Walton Muyumba is a writer, critic, and university professor living in Dallas, Texas

A White Valedictorian @ Morehouse? Stephane Dunn: "Why Not?"

from NewsOne.com

OP-Ed: Why Not Morehouse?
By Stephane Dunn

The calls started early in the week before Morehouse's graduation ceremony and increased after snippets of it appeared on national television. I saw your school on CNN and Fox News, they'd say. "Got the white boy all over TV like that's the most outstanding thing ever to happen at Morehouse."

The 'white boy' of course is Joshua Packwood, the valedictorian for Morehouse's class of 2008.

Some of the internal conversation at Morehouse and within the black community has centered on the question of whether a young white man should be valedictorian of historically black Morehouse and what it says about the school.

And there's another disturbing question which has become the center of media attention about Packwood's presence at Morehouse: Why would a stellar, white male student with Ivy League attention and potential choose Morehouse?

But there is a better question: Why not Morehouse?

Read the Full Essay

***

Stephane Dunn is a visiting assistant professor of English at Morehouse College and the author of Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Premature Autopsies for the Race Man

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)
by Mark Anthony Neal

On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers.

Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club.

Read the Full Essay

Zillah Eisenstein: "Hillary is White"

Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Hillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein

It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.

None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.

And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.

Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.

Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.

Read Full Essay

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Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007).

Thinking Out Loud: BET Struggles for An Audience

from NPR

BET Struggles to Relate with Black Viewers
by Neda Ulaby

Morning Edition, May 16, 2008 · The Black Entertainment Television Network was created to bring authentic representations of African-Americans to cable television. After a couple of decades, however, it finds itself under intense criticism for pandering to the lowest possible tastes. A lot of African-Americans have given up on BET and are turning to other channels that have black shows.

Listen Here

OP-ED: Shame on R Kelly? Shame on Us

From NewsOne.com

OP-ED

Shame on R. Kelly? Shame on Us
by Mark Anthony Neal

While we all can criticize the shamelessness of mainstream media and celebrity culture in the coverage of "events" like the R. Kelly trial, we should all feel a little shameful that the incident depicted in that much-downloaded videotape, did not incite our anger and vigilance--regardless of whether Robert Kelly was in the room.

Read the full essay

Thinking Out Loud: The R. Kelly Trial Begins

from Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ)

R. Kelly Trial Brings Up Broader Issues
Produced by Natalie Moore on Friday, May 09, 2008

Today, the R. Kelly child pornography trial finally gets underway. Six years ago police arrested the R&B star after a videotape surfaced of a man having sex with a girl, allegedly underage girl. Prosecutors say that man is Kelly. Kelly is pleading not guilty. Despite his legal travails, Kelly remains a multi-platinum-selling artist. And there will undoubtedly be a lot of hoopla as the case unfolds. But it’s more than mere celebrity obsession. For some, Kelly’s trial raises complicated issues around race and gender.

Listen Here

***

from the London Times

Pied Piper of R&B, R. Kelly, goes on trial over 'child sex' video
by James Bone (New York)

...After many delays, including the presiding judge falling off a ladder, the singer suffering a burst appendix and the lead prosecutor giving birth, the allegation is finally being put to a trial. Jury selection began yesterday to pick a panel that could put the self-styled “Pied Piper of R&B” behind bars for up to 15 years if he is found guilty.

As R. Kelly arrived at court yesterday, fans cheered, but critics waved signs and called him a pedophile. Inside, Judge Vincent Gaughan outlined the indictment to potential jurors, while the defense lawyer Marc Martin told the court that the jury pool had been “irrevocably poisoned” by an article in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday citing sources talking about a potential witness.

Read the Full Article

Philly Po-Po Beatdown--About Race?

from NewsOne.com

Philly-Beatdown Was All About Race
by James Braxton Peterson

It is somewhat disingenuous for Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a black man, to suggest that Monday night's beat-down of three black men by about half-dozen uniformed officers was not about race. Of course it was about race (and class). Could this 'traffic stop' beating have possibly happened to three white men? I can't even imagine it.

Read Full Essay

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James Braxton Peterson, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC.

Steal This Election? Bakari Kitwana on Media Coverage of Obama

from NewsOne.com

Steal this Election
by Bakari Kitwana

If the year 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court, then 2008 belongs to the media. This year will go down as the one when the mainstream media worked over time to sabotage the Democratic primary.

For months, Senator Barack Obama has been the undisputed frontrunner. Even before this week’s decisive primary races in Guam, North Carolina and Indiana, he was ahead in the delegates count (1748 as compared to Clinton’s 1609, according to realclearpolitics.com).

He’s been ahead by a comfortable margin in the popular vote. He’s raised more money than anyone, with no sign of letting up. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s ignited record youth voter turnouts in one state after another all year.

By now, in any other election, the Democratic Party would have strongly encouraged the losing candidate to concede. The only logical reason why they haven’t—especially since Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning—is because Party leaders don’t want to accept Obama as their candidate. The party’s failure to accept the front-runner has created an opening for the media to take him down.

Because of decisions made in elite newsrooms, for six weeks the nation’s attention has been focused on the pastor of the frontrunner. The magnitude of coverage for someone on the periphery of a major election, such as Wright, is unprecedented.

Let’s be clear: the media gave Jeremiah Wright national coverage for a speech at the NAACP convention the day after a heavily publicized PBS appearance. In recent history, I don’t ever recall the media giving ‘breaking news’ live coverage to any Black Civil Rights organization. Even President Bill Clinton’s 1992 chastisement of Sista Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition gathering was witnessed via played back sound bites.

Read the Full Essay

Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"
by Mark Anthony Neal

Yesterday was the Democratic Primary for President in North Carolina; It was also the 73rd anniversary of my father's birth. The alignment of the two events seemed logical to me as it was my remembrance of the first time that my father voted--for fellow Georgia native Jimmy Carter in 1976--that forced me off the political fence. As a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father had little expectation that he would ever be able to vote, let alone vote for someone who looked vaguely like him. I can remember the look of pride on his face when he cast his first ballot and it was that look that I specifically recalled when I decided to support Obama back in January. And it wasn't so much about Obama--there wasn't anything inherently progressive about his politics--but that his candidacy inspired a level of investment in the political process--or "the franchise" as the old-timers liked to call it, hence the term disenfranchisement--that I had not witnessed in my life.

I celebrated the anniversary my father's birth by walking into my local polling spot, holding the hands of my two daughters, so that they could get a first hand view of participating in "the franchise". Indeed I was a little older than my 9-year-old is now when I was introduced to the political process working phone banks in the Bronx for Jimmy Carter's campaign. It was something that my 5-year-old said to me a few days ago though, that really forced me to think about what participating in the process really meant.

Watching yet another round of political ads on TV, my youngest daughter asked "daddy, are we voting for [Ba]Rock Obama?" and I immediately recalled historian Elsa Barkley Brown's classic essay "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom." In the essay, Barkley Brown examines the voting practices of black communities in Richmond, VA after the Civil War.

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John L. Jackson, Jr.: Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright

The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated May 16, 2008

Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright
By JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

In the 1950s and 1960s, "consensus historians" such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a "paranoid style" of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That "sick" style was concerned with "the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content." Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia —racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren't just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of "affirmative-action babies." They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called "two-faced racism" — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism's newfangled subtleties.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn't underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

Read the Full Essay

***

John L. Jackson Jr. is an associate professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, was published this spring by Basic Civitas. He blogs as Anthroman

A Handclap of Praise for Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers reflects on his interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright in this essay from BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, airing Friday, May 2, at 9p.m. on PBS

The Shootings Behind the Headlines

from NewsOne.com

The Chicago Shootings: Why Black Men Kill Each Other
by Mark Anthony Neal

For every Sean Bell murder, there are many more that never generate media coverage nor public scrutiny. In recent weeks, sandwiched between coverage of Obama's "Bitter-gate" and the Sean Bell verdict in New York, there were 36 shootings (with 9 murders) over the course of a single weekend in Chicago. Much of it was gang-related and involved young black men, but let's not pretend that this problem is endemic to Chicago. What our community needs to tackle is, Why?

According to recent Department of Justice figures, black males aged 18-24 have the highest homicide rates in the country. Additionally, this same age group is most likely to kill and their black male peers are their likely targets. These statistics though, give us little inkling of the on-the-ground issues instigating such violence.

Many continue to blame the usual scapegoat, rap music, even as the aforementioned report suggests that homicide rates decreased during the height of the so-called "gangsta" rap era in the 1990s. Still more continue to cite the absence of male adults in the lives of these young men and boys. Neither theory gets at the everyday pressures corroding the black male experience, where hypermasculinity or, "manhood," is often the only tangible source of power and respect available to young black men.

Read the Full Essay

Guest Post! William Jelani Cobb on The Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah's Failed Crusade
by William Jelani Cobb

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just been awarded a construction contract. And that's the best case scenario -- in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting that Wright's intentions were benign. Assuming they were, the reverend's appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people responsible for distorting it.

Let's be clear: Wright has been wildly mischaracterized and defamed. His comments may have been incendiary but the were largely taken out of context. Even his more controversial views coexist with a generally well-informed view of American society. It's also natural instinct to respond to the kind malice that has been directed at him for the past six weeks. You see a fire, you want to throw water on it. But this situation is more akin to a grease fire, which means that you have to respond to it in a way that runs counter to your instincts. Instead, Wright opened the faucets and the flames have spread far beyond their original boundaries.

In the wake of his press club appearance you heard disparate rumblings that are growing into a chorus of condemnation. The difference is that these jeers are now coming from black people. He started out with the enmity of misinformed whites who knew him only through the manipulated soundbites that had been looped ad nauseum (but which were, until now, dying down.) But now he has done nothing to diminish their scorn and has gained the contempt of a growing number of black folk who feel that he has single-handedly ruined our chance to have a black president.

That perspective isn't accurate, but it is increasingly common only a day after that appearance. Writing in the NY Times, Bob Herbert accused Wright of vengefully sabotaging Obama with the press conference yesterday; Errol Louis in the Daily News gave Wright the benefit of the doubt and said that "He couldn't have done more damage to Obama if he tried." I received an email from a friend who referred to it as "black-on-black crime" another speculated that he was secretly on Hillary Clinton's payroll. And then there are the innumerable crabs-in-a-barrel references cycling around the internet. I'm not prepared to say that Wright was out to destroy Obama's candidacy (though that may well be the outcome) but it was entirely predictable that people would draw that conclusion.

It has to be unspeakably difficult to hear oneself lambasted and defamed for weeks on end but Wright entered that conference with a flawed agenda: the commercial media exists to exacerbate controversies, not defuse them. The degree of truth in his words was nearly irrelevant; what matters is the way in which those words would inevitably be consumed, filtered, repackaged and distributed. If the mainstream media operated on the basis of people's good intentions we would probably have far more mutual understanding and they would have far less money. This might have been minimized had Wright called Roland Martin, Ed Gordon, Gwen Ifill and done a roundtable of responsible black journalists or sat down with Amy Goodman or even given it a rest after the Bill Moyers interview he did days earlier. But in addressing the National Press Club the reverend was like a man who had already lost $1000 to a card hustler but decides to play again – double or nothing.

Wright was also likely buoyed by a false confidence in his own communication skills. He is a brilliant preacher but a podium is not a pulpit. He has spent the last 36 years in an arena where people literally say "amen" to your opinions, one where your credibility is virtually unquestionable. But yesterday he was talking to journalists, people who are, by definition, skeptical and start with the premise that if someone in public is talking, there's a good chance they're telling a lie. Anything Wright said was grist for the machine. He was playing an away game without recognizing that he lost home field advantage the minute he left his pulpit. Anything he said beyond "Jesus loves you" would be used against him.

It's been argued that Wright felt Obama threw him under the bus with his Philadelphia race speech, but a moment's reflection would reveal that those words constituted anything but a political stiff-arm. In Philadelphia Obama offered as subtle and daring a defense of Wright as he could have and far more than any other politician would have given in the situation. (Jocelyn Elders and Lani Guinier were dispatched by Bill Clinton for offenses far, far less damaging than Wright's video clips have been to Obama.)

The irony is that less than twenty-four hours later Wright got to see what a real denunciation looks like. Obama has been painted into a corner, in large measure a victim of his own attempt to place Wright into context. It looks all but certain that Wright will be looked at by a large segment of black America as the man who tried to ruin a dream. It will be a vast distortion of Wright's distinguished legacy but its what people will believe.

And, as any one of the media in the room could have told him, perception is reality. Jeremiah Wright has a lot of explaining to do. And that probably means that the worst is yet to come.

***

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Spelman College. He specializes in post-Civil War African American history, 20th century American politics and the history of the Cold War. He is also a contributing writer for Essence magazine, an essayist and fiction writer and the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (NYU Press 2007) as well as The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). He is editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader, which was listed as a 2002 Notable Book of The Year by Black Issues Book Review. Cobb is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 5th Congressional District in Georgia.