In the comment section of my earlier diary, Alan Keyes In "Return To Ridiculousville", commentator Gary Gray quoted Steve Gilliard:
I don't want there to be any misunderstanding. Black people hate what Alan Keyes stands for.
I'm sure that some people like the guy, there are some useless fools who call themselves Republican. who do, but to most black people in America, he is simply a traitor. He betrays the community, the culture, everything good about being black.
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Now, I know being black isn't easy, and some people, unfortunately, are driven crazy. I mean did Keyes try to lighten his skin? Bathe in milk? Why did he have to try so hard to adapt the way of his masters.
It isn't even that he's a conservative. There are lot of people who are black and conservative, at least socially. But Keyes crossed over and decided to take stands which would hurt black people, to prove he wasn't like us. He wanted to be a special negro, one white people would like, would let run something.
But of course, they would no more do that than let him marry their daughters.
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People need to understand that black conservatives are our shame, our embarassment. People driven mad to assimiliate at ANY cost, their soul, their dignity, common sense.
Look at the respect people like Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley and even Oprah gets. They don't debase themselves for the approval of white people. They have character and dignity. Look at the gollum which is Alan Keyes and you see something entirely different, sadder, but different.
Unsurprisingly, what Steve said here (of which the above is only the briefest excerpt) gets to the very heart of the matter. |
When Alan Keyes says of Barack Obama:
"The man is an abomination.... That is a man with such a seared conscience, I can't even understand why anyone in their right mind would consider him worthy of political support....
Isn't he obviously actually speaking of himself in his relationship to both the black and the white community, precisely as Gilliard lays it out for us? Isn't this as plain as the nose on your face? And, as Steve says, this is not any sort of mystery to black people. It is universally understood in the black community, not just about Keyes, but about his whole type.
In his post, Gilliard quotes a famous passage from Malcolm X's speech "Message To The Grass Roots", where he talks about the house Negro and the field Negro:
To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro -- back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food -- what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here....
America is a nation of self-invention. Of impersonation, if you will. We act is if we are someone else--someone we wish to become. And that is precisely what happens, though of course, there's always a twist.
This is one of the things that makes American conservatism so fundamentally absurd. Most conservatives everywhere cling to an imaginary past. Hesiod's Works and Days recalls a golden age, followed by a silver age, and bronze age, none of which ever existed. It's an utterly typical conservative text.
And yet, most societies did have a more or less organic origin. They developed gradually over time, and continuity characterized them more fundamentally than radical change. Not so America. Not so at all. We were born in a desire for mass reinvention--the very epitome of the "New World"--and Americans have been reinventing themselves ever since.
This is but one reason why America is fundamentally a liberal nation. The essence of liberalism is individual autonomy secured by the state. What greater autonomy is there than to fully reinvent oneself? To impersonate who one would be, and become that impersonation?
In this sense, as in so many others, blacks are the quintessential Americans. Not only have blacks repeated reinvented themselves, they have customarily done so in at least two ways at once--once for what white society demands of them, and once for themselves. Alan Keyes is a broken man, like all house negroes before him, because he only reinvents himself for his white masters. There is no reinvention for himself.
Typically, blacks have re-invented themselves to fit white stereotypes that insist they are not fully autonomous. They are, at best, the sidekick in the buddy movie. They must re-invent themselves to pretend to lack the power of re-invention. They must impersonate creatures incapable of impersonation.
Keyes senses something important about Obama--though not unique. Obama's biographical writing, the core of his political identity is precisely this: a claim to the archetypal white American myth, a myth of self-discovery, and self-making. He is, in fact, impersonating Abe Lincoln and Horatio Alger. This is, of course, nothing new. This was Clarence Thomas's celebrated "Pinpoint strategy," his way of getting himself confirmed to the Supreme Court by marginalizing all other concerns with his claim to the American myth of self-making.
But up 'til now conservatives have done a remarkable job of denying liberals access to this myth. Joycelyn Elders, for example, was perfect example of such self-invention, but she was not allowed to use the myth to defend herself politically.
In sharp contrast, Thomas was actually a far, far cry from what this myth propounds. He had all manner of assistance in his self-making quest. He was carried all the way to the Ivy League. He was given numerous assists, And it infuriated him. Because the reality is that no one is self-made with the assistance of others. Most folks simply take this as a given. But it clashes sharply with the conservative mythos. Most conservatives are happy hypocrites, so it all works out. But black conservatives often seem to miss this subtlety, and perhaps that's just one more thing that tends to drive them just a little more nuts than their white brethren.
And yet, he was still able to claim this myth, even though he seemed positively allergic to it for anyone who bothered to watch him carefully.
So this was Obama's great achievement--unlike Joycelyn Elders, or many others before him, he was able to pull a Clarence Thomas, without becoming Clarence Thomas. He was able to impersonate Horatio Alger and Abraham Lincoln for his white audience without becoming totally consumed by that act of impersonation. And Alan Keyes quite rightly saw this as a very, very dangerous development, even though he was far, far, far too unaware to understand just why. |
