Sherherd…I truly understand the issues you’ve regarding the good Mr’s externally imposed career tract.  From both within and from the outside, expectations of even the most accomplished of black professionals are either influenced toward a particular genre in the interest of others, no matter the desire of the controlled, or as in the recent AMA apology to blacks doctors exclusion from futhering the studies in medicine, leaving very little legacy of hightened research and practice to the few blacks that ever make it to medical school.

It’s as if the higher the achievement, blacks must lower their expectations of advancement and just be happy to be there. Agency is illusive, no matter the strata it seems.

This is in belated response to the epithet, “FluffPo:”

Is AH a female Joe Lieberman?  A neocon in nice clothing?  What’s up with her anti-democratic assertion of the need to heal the Republican Party?  How ‘bout we let them die a well deserved and dignified death?

Do we rejuvenate dead skin, like finger- and toe-nails, or do we exfoliate and apply copious lotion?

By ApprxAm, November 16 at 2:29 pm #

Rit Margue….

Race can’t be ignored…nice that would be. It’s impractical, and utopia to some degree; electing a black president proved much easier, and though important to Black Americans, this is Mr. Obama‘s life-long triumph as an individual.  Your goal, though, is laudable. But ignoring race would prevent us, Afro-Americans from dealing with it in a more productive way, because “race” does matters.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It matters so much—as indispensable as breath itself—that she suggests we find out for ourselves by engaging in a silly poetic exercise equally silly as holding our breath: try reading these words while ignoring these words.

Try living NOT as a skin-contained, self-encapsulated, cellf-imprisoned ego, the mechanistic fallacy of the quantum-singularity ego, for an even moment….;-}

Look

I’m done saying

Still reading?

Rit Margue….

Race can’t be ignored…nice that would be. It’s impractical, and utopia to some degree; electing a black president proved much easier, and though important to Black Americans, this is Mr. Obama‘s life-long triumph as an individual.  Your goal, though, is laudable. But ignoring race would prevent us, Afro-Americans from dealing with it in a more productive way, because “race” does matters. For example: localized and internal processes need retooling and cultural norms reexamined before external ones can be effectively enacted. It’s not good enough to get rid of Kwame Kilpatrick, but do you to fix the things he didn’t?

Moreover, I am concerned with your “security in playing the victim’ statement.  Though I believe the phenomenon real, I fear the term to simplistic; too holistic. When victimization is used in the “racial” context, one has to remember to delve into the complexity of the society one places that title, the beneficiaries who in using victim hood of the community, substitutes leadership for the principles of individual agency, suffering self-sufficiency and retarding the growth of “the race”, while not confounding not knowing how with not wanting to try. The former smacks of blaming the victim.

Here are some other “Catch-Phrases” or things of BS that need erasing or changing:

  White guilt
  Affirmative Action
  New Math
  Black “leadership” without service
  The Congressional Black Caucus
  Jackson, Sharpton, Young, Bond, Rangel, etc.
  Reparations

...and any other item that takes away the autonomy of the individual black’s pursuit of citizenship and happiness.

All is needed is room to breathe and the common protects afforded every other America, not much more.

Rit Margue, thanks for that great suggestion, I’ll give it a try.

Yours reminds me of an exercise I began a long time ago.  Try going a day without using mechanical terms for organical beings.  My inline dictionary recognizes ‘mechanical,’ but not ‘organical!’

Are we beings, or machines?  Do we grow from within, or do we master with whip and psycho-terrorism that denies our shared humanity in order to force us into compliance, to compel us to obey external orders?

“Being or Machine?” is the fundamental dilemma of this time.

Jeez - when Bush took time to relax, liberals accused him of taking too many vacations.  Thanks for the insightful words Alice - now get back to your authoring and activisming.

Alice who?

I though the woman in the photo was Whoopi Goldberg

O sister my Sister Alice, I enjoyed seeing you on DN! the other day. I especially enjoyed your very moving letter to our Poet-President-Elect.

Wasn’t his victory speech a beautiful poem? It was only in listening to it the morning after that it dawned on me: that’s why he speaks like that!

I see a few comments that are very insulting to the spirit you express.  Let me ask the detractors: are we Beings, or machines?  Are we Being aware of this right here: our shared becoming?  Or mere Newtonian mechanisms?  The reductive method works great for very simple systems (orbits and eclipses, for example) but not at all for systems that are historically contingent (planet surfaces and being human).

I for one know myself as a Being aware of my own becoming; and like all beings, as opposed to machines, I grow from within.  So, my friends, explain THIS with reductive mechanism. ;-}

I use the terms for siblings as I do as a reply to Walt Whitman and his famous phrase regarding Pres. Lincoln, lying in state.

There are two big differences between me and Whitman: 1) Whitman was gay (and that’s just fine with me); and 2) I’m not dead yet!

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who’s there?)
BUDDHA!
(buddha who?)
KNOW! BUDDHA U!

O Sister! My Sister
[First voice: Osiris speaks to his beloved Isis; second voice: Luke speaks to his sister, Leia Skywalker; third voice: we all speak with one voice; fourth voice: Being Aware of Becoming.]

My sister is my Goddess;
My sister is my Wife.

My sister is my Princess,
For whom
I bear all
S T R I F E!!!

My sister is my Mother!
Beyond whom

There is

no

Other.

In sum, O Sister! my Sister! my Sister is my
L I F E!

O Brother! My Brother
Washington Poets Association
http://washingtonpoets.org/owas/view.php?a=1116
(First voice: Isis speaks to her beloved Osiris; second voice: a caregiver speaks to a retired pilot; third voice: we all speak with One voice; fourth voice: Being Aware of Becoming.)

My brother is my God; yes,
My brother is my Husband, too;

My brother is my Pilot,
For whom
I am

Ground c r e w .

My brother is my Pater, He
Who rhymes with Mater ‘n Water;

In sum, O Brother! my Brother! my Brother, He is
Y O U !

TO….Rain Toledo, November 9 at 5:01 pm:

In the Spirit of healthy interchange, I submit this lilnk for your consideration:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/prop-8-myths.html#comments

I have no personal opinion on the mathematical dynamics of this issue, (though I absolutely voted against prop.8)... but I found this to be very interesting..This is
Nate Silver’s website, and he seems to me to be well-worth considering…

Strive on…......

alterid?  Really?

Her concern for “Brother” Obama’s family is interesting considering her daughter Rebecca reports Walker wrote that their “relationship had been inconsequential for years, and that she was no longer interested in being my mother.” (Wikipedia) I suppose being a mother conflicts with her bi-sexual lifestyle. My advice to President Elect Obama (I have more respect for him than to call him “Brother”}
is simple: “Consider the source on all the free advice you are getting.”

Wow…the deifying of this man, negatively or positively, so f*ckin laughable. Have we lost our GODDAMN minds in this country?

1) Alice Walker is a self-important idiot with no sense of how silly she really sounds with this “sistagirl” BS she’s passing on. (And who cares about her and her daughter’s relationship.  Maybe the daughter is a “jerk” too.)

2) Jim: blacks are linging up just like everybody else, but don’t worry, there is no structure to fix them and Mr. Obama isn’t charged with such a task. COUNTRY FIRST.

3) Rain Toledo: His “betrayal” of gay issues isn’t that unusual, is it?  The Gay Rights issues only come up during elections, either by luck or design, by the NeoFacist Right or by Gays themselves, and with the exception of lower courts, has either failed or at the very least drawn out the “hill-Billy” vote hellbent on persecuting someone to make themselves feel good.  Can one really betray what one never supported; Palin and the RePugNaConz speaks so negatively about gays, but, to you, Obama is the problem.

The President-Elect’s job will be to try and fix this f*cking country’s ass-backward economy, extract us from Iraq as responsibly as possible, defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and manage, among other things, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Russia the system we call “Capitalism”, energy, banks, AI-fucking G and everything else Dick/Bush screwed up. 

So don’t worry, blacks will still be second class citizens in the country adn our commercials will still have people yelling “holla”, no matter the content; gays will still draw fire from the extreme right and then blame blacks in Los Angeles and Obama for not backing them, and Alice “jackass” Walker will still be a (fill-in)_________ .

Like that loser in the Polish legislature comments about whites losing “power” or their elite status, Mr Obama isn’t nor should he, listen to the petty, thoughless and small self-interest of no consequence, there is a “real” world outside to deal with.

What the hell is she talking about? A woman who constantly mars the image of the black male giving advice to, what for it….a black male?  Why does she feel free to give to him her “sage” observations and not, say, George Bush or Dick Cheney?  I’m sure they could’ve used her auspicious blessing. I’d like to think that Mr. Obama is saying the same thing…“WTF, is she for real?”

Now I guess every black writer, rapper, athelete and “squeegie” guy, half-witted and otherwise, has something to say to get him started. F—her.

C’mon, guys and gals!  Give Alice a break.

She’s absolutely right.  In order for our President to remain effective over his term(s), he must find balance in his life.  That means family, faith (if that’s in his personal sphere) and relaxation. 

Barack has shown he can keep things in perspective.  How else could he remain so cool despite the harrowing months leading up to his election?

Michelle will see that he has family time.  We should allow him time on the B-ball court with worthy adversaries, watch him sink a few rim-less 3-pointers, and never, ever allow him to go bowling again in the Rust Belt! 

Above all, let’s give him our support.  We need him to succeed.

In the future, Alice Walker’s advice letter will be listed as a prime example of chutzpah.

Well Alice,
Whomever here on TD thinks they ‘know’ you, or your private life, does not…
and whomever here on TD thinks they ‘know’ me, knows even less…
so it goes..

I understand what you are saying, and it is my belief
that Mr. Brother
President-Elect Barack Obama does also..

Good on you, Alice…

Strive On..

I don’t like this crap, “you are the one we have been waiting for.”  Obama as messiah.  Bush and many of his followers said he had been chosen by God to lead America.  There’s too much of this bs in American politics.  It’s ok when our side does it?

Troublesum, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Bah! Humbug!

Typical american buddhist - all phoney peace and love.  When 9/11 hit they were the first to say, “Kill the bastards, bomb everywhere!  Buddha never said to turn the other cheek.”