Michael Copperman's Open Salon Blog

What I Hear When I Hear Obama

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:10:38 -0400

The classroom, cold with morning. Approaching eight. The rattle of the heater by the shelves, an insufficient heat. Cold orange light at the rear windows, throwing diamonds off the razor wire fence ringing the school, plying chainlink shadows to the concrete yard. In the back of the classroom, twenty-six coats on hooks: evidence of arrival, promise of another day. The bell rang in the tasks at hand. Every student at a desk, at work on the morning math: A dozen review problems, the nine multiplication table, some long division, the daily word problem: Lashawn buys 234 donuts. He fills boxes with a dozen donuts each. How many boxes will he have, and how many leftover donuts will he eat?

The only sound in the room was pencil to paper. Only Terence, long finished, lolled in his seat, too-long legs twisted beneath the desk. I glanced at him, and he grinned, reached beneath his desk for his book, opened to the bookmarked page and began to read, performing for my benefit, lips forming the words to stress his effort. I hid my smile. Now a hand: Lashawn, big-eyed, enthusiastic about his word problem. “Mr. Copperman, what a dozen is?” He says dozen doe-zen, a dream of feng-shui deer. “Twelve,” I said, and he nodded, began to write. “One minute left,” I called to a collective intake of breath, the mounting scratch of pencil-lead. I’d wait two minutes. Terence’s mouth worked a hundred words per minute. Lashawn’s pencil clattered to the desk, and he reached a hand to his hair, slicked it back with satisfaction. Finished. More pencils followed, clatter of completion; I covertly watched Aronisha, my slowest math student, chew and chew at her eraser, turn her eyes to the ceiling, write something and lower her pencil.

“Please stand.”

A creaking of chairs, and two dozen straight backs, faces turned to the dangling red, white, and blue, and every hand to a heart except Terence, who’d somehow figured his heart on the right side. District policy and Mississippi State Law had us pledging to the country, under God and indivisible, even by the dozen, and liberty and justice and the freedom to live this life within razor-wire fences and shotgun shacks and flat, open fields. And then the expectant pause as I walked to the front of the room, hands clasped behind my back, and all of us began together: “I pledge allegiance to the class, to work together and never rest…” This pledge was always louder, reckless volume and declaration of intent. I knew they could hear us next door, the sound shivering through cinder block: some things couldn’t be fully muted. The call and response was roared: What’s today? An opportunity to learn. What’s tomorrow? Too late! When’s the time? Now. Whose education? Our education! Whose future? Ours!

No-one missed the chance to go, every opportunity was bellowed and no voice not lifted. I spoke quietly, listened to make out each voice: the screech of Terence, Lashawn’s deep shout, Felicia’s voice ringing clearly, resonant, almost sung. At the end, the silence was pregnant for a moment, as we lingered in that promise, in everything that had been declared for this day, week, year, and then there was the complaint of metal and plastic as everyone settled to their seats and the work began in earnest, hands raising to offer answers, to be called on and declared right and so rewarded, so confirmed in imminent success.

It has been four years since I taught in the Delta, and the years since have taken me far from that classroom, from that time when I dedicated everything to improving the uncertain future of those children born on the wrong side of the tracks. And yet, I can still feel the texture of those humid Delta mornings, hear the rhythm of the voices of black children echoing down the halls. I still remember the sense of purpose that I had each day, knowing that this, here, mattered: a child’s education, their best chance against bad odds to rise from those dusty streets and slumping tenements and find a better life. Opportunity. The word has been tossed around in this election. At the end of the debate, I heard Mr. McCain presume to claim the issue of educational inequality as his own, and even go so far as to mention Teach For America in service of his plan to institute a voucher system. And I shuddered.

There’s no need for me to discuss why Mr. McCain, or indeed Republicans in general, have a lack of vision about education—it ought to be enough to say that the poor are not a central Republican concern. I am, at this late stage of the campaign, exhausted with the partisan. I’m exhausted with the character attacks, the Ayer-izing of the candidate, the Palinization of politics, the cries of “Kill him!” and “He’s an Arab!” and “Terrorist!” I’m exhausted with Joe-Six Pack and Joe the Plumber and even Joe Biden the everyman of Scranton. I’m not surprised to hear that Republicans think pictures of Mr. Obama with fried chicken and watermelon is ‘fine’, nor am I surprised that Republicans would defend those foods as, ahem, ‘food we all eat.’

I wasn’t surprised to see, in a recent New York Times article wired from the Deep South, quotes from white folk interviewed in the parking lots of Kroger and Wal-Mart that said the problem with Mr. Obama is the miscegnegation that made him: the Bible told the Israelites to stay unto themselves, and so. I know those folks. They stared and ogled me, another fellow mixed racial background with roots in Hawaii, for two full years, sometimes approaching me with twisted lips to inquire, “What exactly is you, anyway?”

My answer was always, with a grin: “American.” I am, I suppose, one of very few Americans who isn’t black and can say I’m voting Obama because of identity politics.

No, no. I am not surprised at the racial overtones of the race, or at the overtness with which it has been wielded as weapon and wedge. I am not surprised at the ugliness of the fringe, or the acts of racists. But I am surprised to hear that Mr. McCain would mention my service in the classroom, and then suggest a sentence later that we ought to create charters and a broader voucher system—to privatize the public, a thinly veiled attempt to fund private schools which are havens of white flight and wealthy flight (which are sometimes the same, but not always). I would like, then, to suggest two things concerning Mr. Obama, and both of them concern race and are positives: tit for tat, in this case.

The first is that, whether or not Mr. Obama is the whitest black man in the history of America, he is nonetheless black, and that matters to the way we think about equality. There was a moment late in the debate with McCain, after the turn to education and health care, when Mr. Obama was speaking, and the words were flowing, his demeanor calm, his tone measured and resonant and confident, when I stopped listening and just watched. Here is excellence, I thought. Here is presidential timber. Here is change—change in symbols, in emblems and mythos, in our idea of what constitutes America’s finest.

The second point relates to the first: As Obama has campaigned these last twenty months, speaking to crowds all across America, his face and voice have traveled through television screens. His rising star, through the airways and radiowaves, has been to the places that nobody visits—the places that are forgotten, that are out of our sight and mind. And in the rural ghettoes of Mississippi where the children I taught are beginning high school now and remain untouched by our first-world headaches ('What a financial cry sis is, and why they mention that Wall street all the time—and what all this bout where recess in and why do everybody care?'), even there, his voice echoes and echoes. In fact, I believe that on those sun-baked streets, Obama is amplified. I can picture it everywhere, a diffuse hum, an excitement, a new and unexpected possibility crackling through the air. Perhaps Terence, who wanted like most young black boys to be a basketball player or football star, is hearing that noise right now. It starts as a murmur, something about opportunity and equality. He turns, looks for its source. It’s the voice of a black man, sure, but more than that, it’s vigorous with success and confidence. It says: Yes, you can. And over time the volume swells and swells, it rises to a roar, and maybe Terence begins to think about what a leader looks like. Maybe he thinks about his future. Maybe he realizes the voice is his now-- and when he starts to speak, everybody turns and listens.

I Can't Answer

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:09:27 -0400

“There are some blows so violent—

I can’t answer!”

-Cesar Vallejo

I turned twenty-two on a Saturday, graduated Stanford Sunday afternoon, and that evening caught a red-eye to Houston and then a cab that got me to the brick school in the ghetto at eight fifteen, just slightly late. I hadn’t slept. The room was full of young, bleary-eyed men and women dressed professionally in collared, belted shirts and slacks. The warm air smelled of deodorant and coffee. Everyone stared as I lowered myself to a child’s chair with a complaint of plastic. The black woman in the pants-suit resumed speaking where she’d left off, her voice thick with conviction.

“You do not understand the poverty these children come from, their single-parent families. They will bring their circumstances to the classroom, where it is your job to offer them opportunity. You will think you know what they need. You will not.”

I had a hard time focusing; I could see the woman’s lips moving, but found the words made little sense. It was fine: ethnic studies had taught me all about poverty and inequality, and I knew all about the struggle of students of color. This woman cited no statistics or numbers, but went on and on about children she’d taught, their struggles and suffering. After the session, I wrote on my evaluation card: “Presentation was lacking in sufficient intellectual content.”

Jermanique was easy to dislike. She was chubby-cheeked and had perfect caramel skin— the lightest girl in the class, and so the envy of all the rest. She came to school made up, eye-makeup and blush on a fourth grader, and she wore pleated skirts and blouses with ruffles, not fading polos and hand-me-down khakis wearing at the knees like the other kids. Her hair was always pulled in fresh braids or rows, with different colored bands and balls that matched the color of the uniform. Her bag was Hello Kitty and I disliked the brightness of the pink, the white trim unstained, as if someone laundered it each day. Her pencils weren’t yellow but blue and green inlaid with silver and gold stars and tiny, smiling animals. She spoke with a bubbly, forward-rushing energy, always hurrying to the next bright, happy thing.

“My mama say I can be anything I want, and I want to do everything, everything,” she’d say.

“Well, you may have—choose one or two ‘things,’” I’d say, cautioning her against diffuse aspirations. Here her classmates had screamed going over the one-story highway overpass on our way to a play in Greenwood—they had never been so high. Jermanique had been astonished, then told them about staying on the thirtieth floor of the Hilton in Memphis, the walls all “glass, glass, glass and them bright city lights.”

“How many ‘glasses’ was there? Or did you mean ‘windows?’” Shasprine, my sharp-tongued favorite, cut in derisively while Jermanique wilted. I ought to have interceded, but pretended not to have heard. It wasn’t just that Jermanique’s parents had money, her mother a nurse at the hospital in Greenville and her father—she had a father, which was in itself an oddity—a contractor. It was the way she flaunted what she had, showing off her new leather shoes to an adoring crowd of girls wearing latex Wal-Mart knock-offs, basking in her plenty, boasting about her trips to Jackson and Memphis and the deep blue swimming pools and all-you-can-eat buffets in the resort-casinos of Tunica and Biloxi. It was the way the kids kowtowed to her, not resentful but admiring of her air of bounty.

I especially hated the way she moved. She was sleek and big-bodied like a seal, had this way of applauding her own arrival, clasping her hands and breathlessly announcing what she’d done, what she was thinking, what she was going to do next. Some days, watching her in class, I would find myself frowning at her. Other times, I’d pass her upraised hand for a second or third time, hoping for anyone else with an answer. She was bright and curious and courteous, less of a problem than the rest of my motley crew with their clamor and defiance and rejecting disinterest. Really, she was the model student. She just didn’t need me—she would have been fine in any classroom, in any place, the statistics said. Children of stable, middle-class two parent households were well enough off anywhere.

Each afternoon at three-fifteen, Jermanique’s father picked her up, pulled his white Ford 150 up to the gates of the school and rolled down the tinted windows and called, “Come on, baby,” in his booming voice while the other children looked on. I’d wave to him, as masculine a wave as I could manage—I was never at ease with black men, who always towered over me. When she was gone I’d feel a sense of relief, would take the three or four kids who remained back to the classroom, where they’d stay until five and six o’clock in the sanctuary of my room, away from the dusty streets and grassed lots, the ballcourt with it’s cracked cement and the old men who lingered in the shade, backs leaned to the chainlink fence watching with hungry eyes. Those kids had no other retreat, no air-conditioned cab and waiting father and home with their own bedroom. They sat in my room, talked sometimes about Jermanique and what her Papa has, what she have and do, without jealousy. They harbored only a pure and impossible longing to be her.

I tried to be kind because she liked me. One day in early October Jermanique spent all day beaming at me, finally came to me after the bell. “Mr. Copperman, it National Teacher Preciation day, so my mama sent you some apples.”

“Appreciation,” I corrected.

She held out a white bag with a bow containing an half-dozen red and orange streaked Gala apples, marked with stickers saying ‘Washington.’ They had to be from the Kroger in Greenville, thirty miles away—the Sunflower food store in Indianola carried only pale, mealy Granny Smiths.

“Thanks,” I said.

When she was gone, I gave the apples to the children who were still in the classroom. “Man, these apples sweet. Sure you don’t want none, Mr. Copperman?” Jacqueline Garner said with her mouth full of Gala.

I shook my head. I wanted no part of what Jermanique had.

One afternoon Jermanique’s father hadn’t arrived at three-fifteen. We stood at the gates to the school, sweating in the sun and listening for the sound of his pickup, and finally I gave up and took Jacqueline and her brother Charlie back to the classroom with Jermanique in tow. Her father knew where my room was. The kids were happy to have Jermanique there, especially Jacqueline, the poorest girl in the class, who I’d often seen admiring Jermanique from afar. Jacqueline’s uniform shirts were holed and stained, and often she and her brother reeked of sweat, their clothes not washed for a month and them unshowered because their water was turned off at home. Jacqueline and Jermanique were in the same guided reading group, which was on the third Harry Potter book, and they discussed the intrigue and fun of it, their favorite part of all that magic. “I like how they live there in those big rooms with beds and got spells to bring as much as they want fresh and hot to that big dinner table,” Jacqueline said.

“I just love love love how they go to that dark wood and it so scary but they always come back fine,” Jermanique said.

Love, love, love, I thought as I pushed open the classroom door and set the children to tasks, Jacqueline and Jermanique filing papers and wiping the chalkboard while little Charlie vacuuming the reading rug. I had to keep an eye on Charlie—sometimes things disappeared in his pockets, though I didn’t blame him. I’d passed their house, the porch sagging to the dirt yard, the walls and roof bowing toward the center and the broken-out windows covered in black plastic. If I were him I’d take what I could get.

The children finished their tasks, got more. The minutes passed. Jermanique became a bit anxious, and I assured her that her father was surely on his way. At four-thirty the Secretary appeared in my door, her mouth pressed in a line. She beckoned me into the hall, spoke in a whisper. “That girl Jermanique’s father wrapped his pickup bout a pole on the highway. He ain’t—he passed. Y’all gone have to wait for the girl mother come pick her up.”

My breath left my chest. “Oh, God.” I felt an awful, guilty slide: what had I wished on her? I glanced back in the room. All of them were staring with the child’s instinct for trouble.

“Thank you,” I said to the Secretary. “I’ll stay here until you call.”

I went back in the room, went to Jacqueline and Charlie and put my hands to their shoulders. “It’s time for the two of you to leave,” I said. Jacqueline nodded, and the two of them grabbed their backpacks and went without protest, fleeing what had closed suddenly about the room. I shut the door behind them. Jermanique stood alone, her eyes wild. “What it is, Mr. Copperman? What she say? Where my Papa is? Where?”

I stood with lips working, stricken, not wanting to tell her of the sorrow she was bound for, and no excuse I could make. Just moments before, I had despised the way her mouth turned up, the shine of her teeth, the dimples in her pudgy little-girl cheeks. And now, here I was with her. Here, and no words sufficient for grief.

Mean Beauty Queen

Fri, 5 Sep 2008 16:09:53 -0400

I listened on NPR yesterday as American and international feminists debated the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s Vice-Presidential nominee, and something was wrong. It wasn’t just the cognitive dissonance of hearing Feminists praise Ms. Palin for her historical candidacy, while Blueblood stay-at-home moms called in to attack Ms. Palin for taking on a campaign with a young Downs syndrome son. It wasn’t that nobody wanted to talk about book-banning. It wasn’t even the strangeness of the dozen-dozen left-leaning callers supporting the ban on speaking of Ms. Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, a pass Republicans would never have offered the child of a Democratic candidate. Taking the high road is better than becoming the Hate-wing Radio Show Right, even if I would like to take a moment to appreciate the effectiveness of abstinence-only education, and to note that Bristol is hardly the poster-child for unwed teenage mothers, given that she’s upper-middle class and white and is marrying the father not exactly by choice (once Ms. Palin and her husband found out what was going on, the machine of keep the child and take the vows was surely kicked into gear independent of anything Bristol might have had to say about it). No. What I was struck by, in the conversation, was the awkwardness of it all.

There were great gaps and holes in the conversation, the echoic rush of radio static as no guest had anything to say. There was no energy to the conversation, and virtually no substance. Nobody was even talking about why Ms. Palin had been chosen, beyond the suggestion that there was a pandering to disaffected Clinton supporter. Nobody seemed to know what, if anything, to say—for these Feminists to note that Ms. Palin has a breathtakingly thin resume, for example, would be an attack on the idea that women can reach positions of power. For these Feminists to speak of Ms. Palin’s Beauty-Queen past, and to note that there is an odd way that her aesthetic appeal seems central to both her career and her candidacy would be to attack a woman on the basis of appearance the way that many did so deplorably during the Clinton run. And so the panel talked and talked and evaded anything uncomfortable, and nothing of significance got said.

I’ve used this example once before, but it’s too perfect not to offer here: when I taught a class examining the role of Miss America in creating the ideal of the American woman, I once had a frat boy get worked up and say, “It’s just not fair that people don’t think women can be beautiful and smart!” What he was missing was of course the bigger point: a woman shouldn’t have to runway walk in a swimsuit before she can take a stage and be heard. Ms. Clinton was a serious figure, which explains a lot of the hatred directed her way: “She’s a castrating bitch,” was one of the more telling slurs directed at her—ie, she insisted on arguing with men as an equal, which meant they couldn’t act like men. When Ms. Palin went on the attack against Mr. Obama in her speech to the Convention, the crowd went wild, and I knew something was wrong in her tone, her presentation, all of it. Ms. Palin is not, surely not a ‘castrating bitch’—she’s a mean beauty queen, the attractive and traditional Christian mom, who rejects that dark-skinned fellow with the un-American name. I once heard a psychologist say that while a woman’s deepest fear of men is that they will rape or murder them, a man’s greatest fear of women is rejection. I’m not saying that Mr. Obama ‘feels’ rejected by Ms. Palin, but rather that having her, the ‘pretty’ girl, turn him down has a strange force. The Republican ticket has become the All-American grandfather parading out his cute young niece—to battle the forces of Otherness. The choice of Ms. Palin restores all the ugliest aspects of the race versus gender war, except now the woman is ‘appropriately’ hot and stands for the ‘right’ things-- things which just happen to invoke every cultural wedge issue at once: abortion and teen pregnancy, guns, the separation of church and state.

This race will be an ugly one, and quite honestly, Ms. Palin is a formidable foe not because of her intellect (I’m not saying she’s not smart) but because of demographics and aesthetics. I know that the properly post-feminist argument here would be to say it’s all fine and well and good—she should be able to use her gender to whatever advantage she wants, to ‘objectify’ herself in her own favor, and in doing so, demonstrate intelligence through that calculation. Perhaps that’s why, on that NPR radio show, nobody knew what to say. I’m not particularly partisan, but the last seven years has made it impossible to believe that elections don’t matter or that politicians are all the same. Voters let subconscious factors make their decisions for them, and the Palin choice is a doozy of a factor—on the basis of a latent sexism that suggests the attractive woman should be kowtowed to, voters get a free pass on their latent racism. Somebody needs to lift their voice, and say what isn’t comfortable before it’s too late.

On Being a Sexist, or, Paris Hilton ain't my kind of woman

Tue, 5 Aug 2008 20:08:08 -0400

I have been called many things in twenty-eight years: Mexican, Korean, gook, chink, wetback, son of a mud-shark whore, Jap, mutt, china-man, stupid dumb ugly mean little man who don’t know nothing bout nothing (Shasprine Gaines had quite a tongue), fag, homo, chicken-fucker (I’m not sure where that guy was going, why), and most often asshole, by my friends, as a term of endearment. Sticks and stones, and the experience of being ethnically ambiguous in America. But until yesterday, I’d never once been called a sexist or a misogynist.

The reason, likely, is that I’m the sort of man who’s not uncomfortable calling himself a feminist. I don’t talk hard about women, even around the boys after a couple beers and the break up fresh and raw. I’ve never called a woman a bitch to her face, unless it was meant in jest and would be understood, and I’ve certainly never trotted out that word that starts with a c that is perhaps the only word in the English language that makes me so uncomfortable I cannot say it. Several of my best friends are women, and um, I treat my mother well. And, oh yeah, there’s the fact that I’m the sort of intellectual who teaches units on gender, who assigns freshman Gloria Steinem and Deborah Tannen and trots out figures about wage inequality and glass ceilings in American business and who lectures about the contradictory ideal of the American woman as created by the media and society. As my friend Keetje said, “If you’re being called out as a sexist, America’s in pretty good shape.”

But the world isn’t in good shape—and I’m not, simply not, misogynist. And so I suppose I want to respond, not in a defensive way, but in a sort of manifesto, a statement of principle: I have the right to be accurate, and speak clearly, with the hope of being understood. In this e-space, a spade will always be a spade.

The charge of sexism was trotted out by fellow blogger Madame Bitch with regard to my essay about Mr. Obama and the McCain ad that featured Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. In that essay, I first asserted that the two women were vacuous and vapid, and so there was no reasonable intellectual comparison with Mr. Obama. Then I asserted that they had been chosen for this comparison because of the way they’re associated with sex and scandal. Madame Bitch asserted that I was being sexist by ‘piling’ it on them, that they ‘cultivate stupid for money’, and bore no responsibility for their actions. Instead, I should recognize that the ‘producers and back-end profiteers,’ the men, forced on Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton their persona and engineered their public conduct for their own profit. When I responded that there was extensive documentation of their daftness and superficiality, Madame said that I was saying ‘well, they asked for it,’ which was “like saying that anchorwomen and or CEOs who go out of their way to be fashionable invite criticism of their looks and clothes.”

Working from the bottom up, the analogy isn’t analogous—an anchorwoman or CEO is in their position largely, one would hope, on the basis of their intellectual (or professional) merit. Criticizing them due to their dress, then, is sexist, and they likely do face sexism. Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton do not rely on their brains. Ms. Hilton is heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, and rose to greater prominence by way of a reality television show that documented her glitzy, superficial, hard-partying lifestyle. Ms. Spears is a young pop star who became famous at sixteen for music and music videos about how sexy and amenable she was to being 'hit one more time.’ The two of them famously allowed the paparazzi to take pictures of them sans undergarments. Ms. Spears has a ninth grade education; Ms. Hilton dropped out of high school but earned her GED. Ms. Hilton is the person responsible for the word ‘hot’ coming to apply not just to physical appearance, but to anything—in other words, all that matters is those superficial aspects of anything that make it desirable. She once asked what a soup kitchen was, and inquired of Wal-mart, “Do they make walls there?” When her breast size increased a couple cups overnight, Ms. Spears famously insisted: “I did not have implants, I had a growth spurt.” Ms. Hilton, when introduced to author Joan Collins, said, “If I could read a book, I'd definitely read one of yours.”

I’m all for a woman’s right to dress as she would and be free of the judgment or comments of men. I’m not all for women prominent in the public eye acting, talking, and comporting themselves foolishly and licentiously, glorifying only the superficial and sexual. To suggest that these uber-rich starlets have no choice, that they are the victims of a vast patriarchal conspiracy, insults the vast majority of women who demonstrate intelligence and don’t rely on sex appeal alone—and must battle the sexism perpetuated by the stereotypes Paris and Britney conform to. I’m not saying sexism isn’t rampant or that patriarchy doesn’t persist. Ms. Clinton’s candidacy showed us just how much, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, we still accept sexism as a matter of biology, though we reject such nonsense in examining race. We have a long, long way to go—and I fully admit that as a man, I simply don’t know how hard it is to be a woman. I understand, too, Madame’s resistance to the gleeful name-calling, the legions of men eager to claim power over a woman by speaking of her body, calling her a stupid bitch or whore or that c word that I can’t say. But to suggest that no woman can be called vapid or unintelligent because that’s a part of the lexicon of sexism is, well, stupid. If we cannot make distinctions based on evidence, we cannot say anything meaningful at all.

When Madame B was first calling me a sexist, I spluttered a bit, got defensive. What I should have done was explain what her reasoning reminded me of: that of a rather slow fraternity brother I taught last year. We were in my unit on gender, studying Miss America as a case study, a cultural artifact that helps create the ‘ideal’ of the American woman. He’d been disaffected the entire class, unhappy to be forced to think critically and speak clearly, but this day he was with it, tipped back the brim of his cap and tried to follow. I showed video of the pageant, opened discussion of an article we’d read by former Miss America Kate Shindle. He raised his hand, waved it in the air, and spoke with passion: “It’s just—it’s not fair. These beautiful women, and people say they can’t be smart!”

I died a little inside, and here’s why: yes, beautiful women can be smart, and there’s an impulse by men to call any attractive woman stupid, and so claim a kind of power. But what’s wrong with the Miss America pageant is that it suggests that before a woman can take the stage, before we listen to what she has to say, she must first look good in a bathing suit, and strut herself before the appraising eyes of the world. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are bathing suit strutters who make no gesture at being articulate or even promoting a cause, as the contestants of Miss America at least do. They revel in, promote, and profit from a performance of the feminine that suggests that all there is to a woman is how ‘hot’ she is. There’s no need to be able to, like, read a book, or know stuff. As Paris Hilton once said, “I don’t really think, I just walk.” There may be a sort of native intelligence to such calculated and exposed a walking—both Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton seem to understand that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. That does not make them the sort of role models that young women should imitate. If it’s misogynist to assert that there’s more to a woman than her sex appeal, I am guilty as charged—and I want to part of a feminism that would condemn me for saying so.

The Politics of Race: Britney, Paris, and the Black Man

Sun, 3 Aug 2008 11:08:08 -0400

I have a confession to make: I am not a blogger. I am an essayist and fiction writer who happens to be close friends with the infamous blogger Terrible Mother. I went through the University of Oregon’s MFA program with her, am Friend Two on her blog, second fiddle to another close friend of mine, Friend One, aka the poet Keetje Kuipers. I write occasional op-eds for the Oregonian and the Register Guard, and sometimes I freelance to papers, but mostly, mostly, I write in Microsoft Word, and what I write stays in Microsoft word until I send it out for publication. I told this to Terrible Mother yesterday as I tried to explain my paralysis at having a blog on Open Salon. “I don’t do funny, TM,” I said. “And I don’t spend my time thinking about the events of my daily life in a fashion that allows me to form them to delightful narratives of humor and tragedy like you do.”

“Fuck off!” TM said. For those of you who don’t know her, you must understand that she uses such phrases frequently—as terms of endearment. Then TM said, “I know what you should write about next. Have you seen the new McCain ad linking Obama to Britney and Paris?”

“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t surf the interweb.”

“You're a dinosaur,” TM said. “Look, just watch it. You’ll have something to say. Trust me.”

And because I always place my trust in TM, because she’s nearly always right, I surfed the interweb, watched the ad on Youtube. The first time, as the screen went from a shot of Mr. Obama, the color-scheme artificially dark, straight to the paparazzi-filled glamour shots of Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton, the two most Aryan sexpots in Hollywood, I thought I was dreaming. I watched the ad again, and again. What was the ad trying to say or do? The script runs as follows:

Announcer: He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.

But, is he ready to lead?

With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling.

And, says he’ll raise taxes on electricity.

Higher taxes, more foreign oil, that’s the real Obama.

A thirty-second advertisement, to be effective, can only make one point. The text of the ad is rhetorically schitzophrenic—'celebrity' versus ' leadership' might make a point, but energy policy has nothing to do with anything. The intention, the manipulation, could only be coming from the pictures. The point was made in the first ten seconds—something to do with Mr. Obama and his relation to celebrities like blond-haired, blue-eyed Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton, who are widely known as vacuous and, shall we say, fast and free with their sexuality. Faced with questions about why he chose the two young stars to compare to Mr. Obama, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said:

"What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world, and I would say from our indications, Britney and Paris came in second and third. Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it is the most entertaining thing I have seen on TV in a while. It is not our campaign that is trying to make him into an international celebrity. It's his campaign... I don't know Paris Hilton and Britney Spears but they are international celebrities, so, you know, apples to apples."

Apples to apples? Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are hardly the top celebrities in the world. And let’s consider the intellectual comparison. The two young women wouldn’t break 150 in combined IQ, and would be hard-pressed to write a complete sentence without use of text-shorthand. Mr. Obama writes speeches so eloquent that criticizing his eloquence is all his opponent can do. Neither Ms. Hilton or Ms. Spears attended college. Mr. Obama attended Harvard Law, and taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago Law School. The idea of comparing them is ludicrous.

Yet taking on the inappropriateness of the comparison ignores the main point: Mr. Obama is, well, a man. One explanation is that in comparing Mr. Obama with ditzy women, the intent is to emasculate him, to make him appear effeminate. Yet the ad doesn't have that effect-- the grainy video footage, the dark colors of the background when we see Mr. Obama, the pictures of the women as glamour shots, not interview footage that makes them seem stupid and shallow. If you want to compare Mr. Obama to a male celebrity, the point might make sense—perhaps a man often embroiled in scandal, or known for a lack of sense in his public comments, or for the scandal in his personal life. Surely such a celebrity exists. In fact, why not a black man embroiled in Hollywood drama—a rapper or singer or sports star? The answer is simple: doing so would so blatantly invoke race that McCain’s campaign wouldn’t be able to get away with it. The McCain campaign is well aware that race and difference are still their best hope—call it the West Virginia factor, the Hussein-ing of the candidate. With Mr. Rove’s old operatives back in play, stooping low isn’t a problem. Yet how to stoop? How to summon fears about race, to bring them out subconsciously and strongly in a manner that can’t be dismissed as simple racism?

The answer is, quite simply, a word: miscegenation. A black ''buck' among the blue-eyed girls. Old, old fear, in a new box. Watch the ad. The dark (I would say darkened) image of Mr. Obama, the juxtaposition with the close-ups of blond-haired, blue-eyed Ms. Hilton and Ms. Spears, lips open a little, lustful gazes. Consider their recent histories of sex tapes and going without underwear, of overnight Vegas marriages and a parade of men in and out of their bed, photographed, documented, playing on reality shows and in the crossfire of the Hollywood gossip mags. If you were going to choose a female celebrity known for idiocy, you’d choose Jessica Simpson, who famously thought that her can of tuna fish was ‘chicken’, as it was labeled ‘chicken of the sea.’ These two women were included as much for the way they make us think of sex as for their all-American Barbie looks. Do you want a black man near our women? Do you trust them? The ad makes a nonsense point about Mr. Obama’s celebrity, and moves incoherently through claims of energy policy. That isn’t the point at all.

When I wrote a column about Reverend Wright and the Politics of Race for the Oregonian, I received a great deal of hate mail. I pointed out in that column that in many states in the US, including Oregon, anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books as late as 1967-- a point I find interesting as a half-Japanese fellow. An angry conservative wrote me to tell me how much he hated me and Mr. Obama and the end of such laws. “His mother was a mudshark whore, just like yours,” he wrote. “And America has no place for traitors like your mothers, or the spawn of sin like yourselves.”

What’s interesting is the poverty of discussion about the ads. Mr. Obama himself has tried hard not to discuss the ads—he’s well aware of the irony of the twenty-four news cycle: rumors and falsehoods, repeated in being debunked, become reinforced as fact. See, Swiftboat ads, summer of 2004, or Obama's a Muslim, as of this week. Obama has done his best not to speak of race, or call foul, afraid that it will just make the situation worse by bringing more airplay. "In no way do I think that John McCain's campaign was being racist," Obama said. "I think they're cynical. And I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues."

Cynical, indeed. Only the New York Times editorial board is calling it like it is, as they did today in a brave editorial: “The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.”

Well, a spade’s a spade. It isn’t coincidence that we get Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, queens of sex-scandal, or that Mr. McCain’s ad shows only images of Mr. Obama (the ending image is as dark-skinned a photo of Mr. Obama as you can tint on Photoshop). The meaning of the ad is in the images. It would be naïve to believe that they ‘didn’t mean anything like that’, or that they would never draw to draw up fears so subconscious that most people watching the ads wouldn’t understand what they were taking away. What this ad does is offer a free pass to the watcher who still has, deep down, a discomfort or fear of a black man. Gosh, I don’t like or trust that fellow, the watcher can think. Oh, and it’s because of Obama’s—celebrity status. No, no, it’s because of his energy policy. Yeah, that's it.

It’s about something far more serious, something most of us don’t want to talk about. And it makes me sad that McCain would stoop so low—and sadder still that it might work. We’re not as far from the past as we like to imagine. We still stare at the multiracial couple at the restaurant, admit that we can’t quite imagine that, privately, however enlightened we think ourselves. Tell me it’s not true, folks, but I can’t find a way not to despair, sometimes, in America.