Jailbreak Press

The specter of Black leaders like Charles Rangel, Andrew Young and BET President Robert Johnson dissing Barack Obama- while cuddling up to the Clintons was enough to make me spend a minute to take a second look at the Clinton record on race and its lasting effects on the Black community. I’m still debating whether the fact that so many African Americans to this day regard the Clintons as some sort of Black saviors is a testament to our gullibility or their political acumen. Either way the record needs to be set straight about the Clinton years and what they meant for African Americans. This is a step in that direction. (more…)

Conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson have claimed in recent Washington Post columns that in his March 18th speech on race, Barack Obama tried to equate his grandmother’s fear of Black males passing on the street and Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Obama’s political fortunes being based on his blackness with the “vitriolic and anti-American” comments of his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He didn’t do that. What he did was describe the roots and expressions of racial resentment that Americans carry with them and suggest that at least some of them stem from legitimate fears. By acknowledging and validating these sentiments he tried to open up a conversation about race that begins with a mutual concession- all Americans have felt pain, resentment, invisibility and misunderstanding connected to their race at some point and the beginning of healing is the validation of all of those emotions and reactions on all sides. (more…)

Mitt Romney had to directly address religion during his primary run in order to assuage the concerns of a critical part of the Republican Party base. Now Obama must speak up about race in order to make clear to all Americans how he views himself in relation to this country’s racial history and contemporary race controversies. Every new week seems to bring fresh calls for Obama to denounce another prominent Black in order to prove how patriotic or politically mainstream he is. This will not stop. If he doesn’t draw a line and more importantly explain where and why he’s drawing the line, these demands are sure to become more audacious and demeaning. Obama had wished this could wait until after the nomination. Clinton’s continued presence in the race has made the issue more immediate.

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