Bob Johnson’s hypocrisy is breath taking :
Charlotte Bobcats owner and founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) Bob Johnson of is free to support whom ever he chooses in presidential politics . He can campaign for the Clintons as much as he wants and he can extol their virtues as he sees them . That said, he does not have the right to traffic in tawdry innuendos and character assassination of the opposition .
Moreover , as the impresario who popularized gold tooth gun totting gangsters and rump shaking hoochies , via his BET rap video programming , I think he is particularly ill suited to lecture the Black community as to who is insulting that community or any other ; Mr. Johnson’s hypocrisy is breath taking .
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Mr Johnson had this to say about Barack Obama :
“To me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood — and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book — when they have been involved,” Mr. Johnson said.
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Oreos And House Negroes: The Clinton Strategy :
Of all the recent race-based attacks on Obama, there are two that strike me as being of vital importance to the Clinton strategy, which has two parts.
The first is Andrew Young’s assertion that, as William Jelani Cobb put it, race can be transferred “like an STD”.
Young also quipped that “Bill is every bit as black as Barack.” “He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack,” Young said of former President Clinton, drawing laughs from a live television audience. Young quickly followed the comment with the disclaimer, “I’m clowning.”
The second is Bob Johnson’s assertion that Obama is like Sidney Poitier as a black doctor being attempting to win over his white fiance’s parents in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner:
Johnson went on: “That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, `I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier `Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ And I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, ‘This ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.'”
I wrote that the point of that insult is that Obama is a House Negro, a sellout. I know that for many of you, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is before your time, so I’m going to let Baldwin explain why the comparison is unflattering.
The Setting of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is the key. We are on the heights of San Francisco–at a time not too far removed from the moment when the city of San Francisco reclaimed the land at Hunter’s Point and urban-renewalized the niggers out of it. The difficult and terrified city, where the niggers are, lives far beneath these heights. The father is in a perfectly respectable, perhaps even admirable profession, and the mother runs an art gallery. The setting is a brilliant recreation of a certain–and far from unnattractive–level of American life, And the black doctor is saying, among other things, that his presence in this landscape, (this hard-won Eden) will do nothing to threaten or defile it–indeed, since tin the event that he marries the girl, they are immediately going to the Far East, or some such place, and he will not be present.
See? This is a character who has been written from the perspective of being as inoffensive to white viewers as possible–so much so that he is willing to leave the hemisphere in order to prevent white people from feeling uncomfortable about his marriage to a white woman.
But both of these are more than just accusations that Obama, on some level is a sellout, both Young and Johnson are calling Obama an Oreo; for the uninitiated, the epithet means that Obama is black on the outside and white on the inside. I wrote while guest blogging at Carpetbagger that:
In my experience, people are called `white’ not for being intelligent, articulate, or for getting good grades, but for expressing a set of priorities contrary to black advancement.
This it the framework in which Johnson and Young are attacking Obama.
What this sets up of course, is the idea that Obama doesn’t have the “best interests of his people in mind”. This is a criticism white people, especially white conservatives, like to level at black activists like Al Sharpton. The reason is that it allows the speaker to retain a certain rhetorical advantage: On the one hand, it allows him to make racialized critiques of a black figure, on the other, it allows the speaker to lend the impression that he is making the critique because he actually cares about what happens to black people.
While it is currently black Clinton surrogates who are doing the heavy lifting, eventually the “Obama is a sellout” meme will become so common that white people will have no problem making the same kind of assertions. Obama’s run for president in itself will become a kind of selling out; a metaphor for his ambition trumping his commitment to the community. If he really cared, they’ll say, he’d still be a community organizer in Chicago.
All of which has the “unintended” side effect of keeping the nigger in his place, which is with other niggers, not in the White House. White people, you will notice, never have obligations not to “sell-out” their people, because they see themselves as individuals. We don’t have that freedom yet.
The other side advantage to the Oreo/House Negro assault is that there is no easy rhetorical comeback. What is Obama supposed to say, that he’s not white? For white people, it will beg the question, “What’s wrong with being white?” Suddenly, Barack Obama, the word of American racial redemption made flesh, becomes Barack Obama, black man running for president.
The second part of the Clinton attack is making it seem like these racialized comments, to which the Obama campaign has barely responded, come from the Obama camp and not the Clinton camp.
First there was Clinton herself:
“I’m particularly offended at the way some have taken out of context and apparently deliberately tried to mislead others about what was said,” said Clinton inside a local Mexican restaurant in Reno. Clinton called the attacks “baseless and divisive.” She went on to say that she was “personally offended at the apporach taken that was not only misleading but unecessarily hurtful.”
“It clearly came from Senator Obama’s campaign and I don’t think it is the kind of debate that we should be having in our campaign.”
Of course, as should be obvious from Bob Johnson’s recent statement, this is exactly the kind of debate that the Clinton Campaign wants to have.
Still, we have Geraldine Ferraro telling white folks that shiftless, hustling Negro from Chicago is trying to bamboozle you!
“As soon anybody from the Clinton campaign opens their mouth in a way that could make it seem as if they were talking about race, it will be distorted,” Mrs. Ferraro said. “The spin will be put on it that they are talking about race. The Obama campaign is appealing to their base and their base is the African-American community. What they are trying to do is move voters from Clinton by distorting things. What have they got to lose?”
Ferraro, by stating that Obama’s base is “the African-American community” rather than the healthy cross section of Democratic voters whom he has to win over to get the nomination, helps to further establish Obama as a polarizing black figure in the vein of Al Sharpton.
The intended irony is that the Obama campaign has everything to lose from this conversation, and the Clinton campaign has everything to gain. The idea behind the racialized attacks is not to mobilize black voters against Obama. They know that we get it. The idea is to convince white voters that Obama is the kind of person who will play the race card at the first opportunity, and to demoralize black voters who question whether Obama can win. Once white people start turning on Obama, black people may give up hope and either not vote or vote for their second choice, who is probably Hillary Clinton.
This is 2008. This is the America we are living in.
Posted by dnA 16 comments Links to this post Topics: 2008 Elections
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Bob Johnson: Hot Political Mess
cross-posted to goodCRIMETHINK
Update 2:43am: more on Bob Johnson’s horribleness, claiming the estate tax is racist, etc.
Update 1:18am Jan 14: check out this post from Too Sense titled Founder of Modern Minstrelsy Goes After Obama. Ouch!!
This political theater is incredible and hilarious. We can’t even get Sunday off around here. Of all the black people in the world who would attack Obama on behalf of the Clintons, it would be Bob Johnson, founder of Black Exploitation Television. Gimme a break!
This is #7 on our incident tracker wiki.
His comments while introducing Hillary Clinton at an event in South Carolina
And to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood - and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book – when they have been involved…
That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, `I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier `Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ And
I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.
Since making these statements, Johnson said he wasn’t talking about drug use at all. He sloppily tried to explain that what had happened was…
My comments today were referring to Barack Obama’s time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else. Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect.
“When Hillary Clinton was in her twenties she worked to provide protections for abused and battered children and helped ensure that children with disabilities could attend public school.
That results oriented leadership — even as a young person — is the reason I am supporting Hillary Clinton.”
Come! On! Now! You really don’t expect me to believe that when you said he “was doing something in the neighborhood – and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book…” that you were referring to community organizing??! I mean I’m sure it’s hard for you to recognize community organizing, especially if it targets your claim to fame, but you are clearly a little rusty on how to run a media empire.
In fact, you know what this excuse sounds like. SHUCKIN AND JIVIN!! See, Mr. Cuomo? This is an appropriate use of the term, and I’m allowed to say it, because that’s what Johnson is doing.
Bob Johnson is not new at the game of selling questionable products to black people.
Obviously there have been, shall we say, issues with the programming of BET even before he sold it to Viacom, one of those six massive mega media companies with not a drop of concern nor obligation to the communities they reach.
On top of that, as Black Agenda Report (no fan of Obama) covered in 2002, Johnson was out working on a Bush commission to privatize (and thus destroy) social security by claiming that because black people die younger, we get nothing out of it.
Here’s a question: why don’t you ask Mrs. Clinton why she is so proud to have the support of a man who pimped stereotypical images of black people and worked to privatize social security?
Posted by Jack Turner 11 comments Links to this post
Help Track Clinton’s Attacks on Obama
Ok, so this past week and even before, we’ve had a lot of blog posts and even more comments pointing out how Hillary Clinton or members of her campaign have thrown questionable, wack or race-baiting attacks at Obama. A lot is getting lost in the mix, and I want single place where folks can read, edit or add to the list. This is an experiment. It could go horribly wrong. It could be amazing. There are more collective eyes and ears among yall than among the four of us blogging here, so I’m asking for some help and some trust.
I present, the Clinton Attacks Obama Wiki.
Click on over there, and read the idea, then get to work. The point is NOT to make ish up, take people’s comments out of context, etc. Some of the incidents have been mad obvious and others much more subtle. Still more have nothing to do with race, but are nonetheless wack. I dare say a few may even be legitimate.
Have at it.
Posted by Jack Turne
http://jackandjillpolitics.blogspot.com/
