How to Be Black (16 page)

Presidential Power-ups!

The plan outlined so far will help significantly in your quest to be the second black president, but there's always more you can do. Here are two bonus lessons offering radically different paths to the White House. Both are optional, but I urge you to consider them if you are serious about leading the free world.

Alternate path #1: Be conservative!

Being the “second black president” might not feel special enough for you, but you can still be a first. You can be the nation's First Conservative Black President. Conservatives love to embrace black people so long as it's one at a time. Some of them even voted for Obama in 2008, but they prefer when they can come up with a conservative version all their own.

When Obama was running for the Senate, conservatives threw up Alan Keyes against him. Keyes wasn't particularly qualified and didn't live in Illinois, but he was black! After Obama's inauguration, the Republicans elected one of their five black members, Michael Steele, as chairman of the party, effectively shouting, “We have a black guy, too!” During the 2012 election season, many conservatives were enthralled with Herman Cain, another black dude, whose relevant political experience consists of having run a pizza shop.

As a black person, you would be a dream presidential nominee for the Republican Party. They could claim that they openly support black people, while your policies work to actively undermine that community. Stay open-minded about this path.

Alternate path #2: Be the open revolutionary they fear you to be

As explained earlier in this chapter, much of White America fears a black president because of the idea that he or she will exact some sort of revenge on white people. This fear of the uncertain possibility can cost a black president significant amounts of support and credibility, as President Obama has learned.

As the second black president, you could break from the deceptive path I laid out earlier and choose instead to be upfront about this plan of ours. Why hide your plan under the label “health-care reform” when you can just call it what it is:
My Program for White Enslavement
.

The American people and media have an incredibly short memory despite technological tools that allow for infinite storage and recall. Every election season, some candidate makes a ridiculous assertion that we all forget about in a matter of weeks or even hours. Remember when Rep. Michele Bachmann signed that pledge claiming black kids were better off under the two-parent households of slavery times than today's preponderance of single-mother households? Remember when Texas governor Rick Perry called Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke a traitor and implied he would be killed in Texas? Remember that time when President Obama strangled those three dalmatian puppies to distract from yet another disappointing jobs report? The lesson for you is clear. If you get this issue out in the open early enough in your campaign, by the time people vote, the shock will have worn off and any of your opponents or members of the media who raise the issue of your White Slavery Initiative will look petty and out of touch for bringing up something you've already addressed countless times.

Good luck, Sir or Madam Second Black President, and may God bless these United and White-Enslaving States of America!

How's That Post-Racial Thing Working Out for Ya?

A
t one point during my writing of this book, someone suggested to me that I title it
Thoughts on Post-Racial America
. I calmly informed this person that the only way the term “post-racial” America was getting into the title of my book is if it was called
Post-Racial America Is Some Bullshit, and Other Thoughts on How to Be Black
.

It is hard to escape some mention of this concept after 2008. As damali put it, it's almost as if America is saying, “We're breaking up with you, black people. It didn't work out.”

The Black Panel, including its white Canadian member, universally agreed with me that Post-racial America is indeed some bullshit:

Christian Lander:
We're definitely not post-racial.

W. Kamau Bell:
That was always a media creation.

Cheryl Contee:
[It] was a fantasy.

damali ayo:
That phrase cracked me up!

Elon James White:
I can't discuss [it] because it doesn't exist.

Jacquetta Szathmari:
[It's] kind of like a unicorn, maybe, or a leprechaun. There's an idea that it exists out there, and some people believe in it, but really, it's not there.

Derrick Ashong:
I'm sorry. Post-racial America is bullshit.

The people have spoken! And even though my statistically significant panel was unanimous about the nonexistence and bullshit nature of “Post-racial America,” they had different ways of thinking about why that was and what it meant.

Let's hear from the white Canadian (Christian Lander) first:

Obama was supposed to bring about Post-racial America in one election, which is fantastic, if it could happen. I think the reaction since then, just looking at how people react and to the anger people feel, the inability to believe that he is actually an American, just kind of proves we're definitely not post-racial.

The rage people have to
[Stuff White People Like]
recognizing differences, just recognizing it's there, is just another signal that [America] is not post-racial, and it's a huge problem.

The idea that some people see post-racial as meaning we don't see race at all, that everyone is exactly the same, there are no cultural differences to anyone anymore, that's even worse. That's just as ignorant and just as terrible.

The harm I see from ignoring racial differences fundamentally comes down to stupidity.

[I], as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Canada, and a first-generation Chinese or a third-generation Chinese person in Canada—even though we grew up literally three blocks apart, went to the same high school, had all the sort of socioeconomic checkboxes that you would think defined a completely level playing field—we have totally different life experiences. They're not the same at all.

To not recognize that not only is stupid but it also demeans the experience of those other people. I don't think you can ever achieve cultural understanding by pretending that cultural difference doesn't exist.

Both Kamau and damali had direct experiences around Obama's election, guaranteeing they would see Post-racial America as a fantasy.

Kamau:

I remember the night that Barack Obama was elected. I was in San Francisco walking around, and there was a buzz in the city and people were all excited. You just heard people have conversations in the street. I was walking down the street, and I turned a corner, and it was weird. These white people were [excited about the result, yelling,] “Barack Obama!” I turned the corner, and they went, “Oh!” It was this weird thing where they were so excited about that black guy being president but not excited about this black guy right here. It was clear, and they responded as if I caught them saying “nigger” or something. It was just this weird gasp . . . and this is living in San Francisco.

The idea of discussing Post-racial America . . . seems dumb. It's like talking about Reconstruction. That period is over. It's a historical thing that we'll cover. We'll be like, “There was this thing called Post-racial America for two weeks,” and then they'll realize, “Oh? No.”

damali:

Two weeks before [Obama] was elected, somebody called me the N-word on my street in my neighborhood back in Portland. So, it was really clear that this was not going to happen. But the country has been trying to push black people under the carpet for a while.

The art world went through this phase where they were calling things post-black, which was insanity. I think it's the same thing that is happening with this. If you're not saying, “We're post-race,” then we don't really want to hear you, because you're bumming us out. So, it just, it's crazy.

Human beings have this infinite potential for courage that they rarely tap. And if people would just dig down and be genuinely honest with themselves, we would all be living in a much better culture. But instead, we're very much addicted to avoidance and cowardice, I think.

Jacquetta's point seemed to flow naturally from damali's belief that post-racial anything is about avoidance.

I don't understand what post-racial means. Does that mean that I'm not going to be black anymore? Or are they just going to get rid of affirmative action? That's what I thought would happen. When they said post-racial they'd be like, “All right, pull up the ladder. Everything is done. Bootstrap your way through. We're finished. There are no more races anymore. We don't have to help you out, and we don't have to acknowledge that there's any difference between white people and people who aren't white.”

That's really the issue, right? It's about white people trying to get rid of race so they don't have to deal with their issues with it. That's what I thought was post-racial. I don't think any black people think that there's post-racial unless you went to Oberlin or something.

Meanwhile, Cheryl and Elon acknowledged that the
ideal
of post-racial may originate from a positive place and not just from a “cowardly” White America, even if its
reality
eludes us.

Cheryl:

Post-racial was a fantasy. I think it's something that people really want, I think there's an urge and a healthy aspiration to becoming a Post-racial America. I would love to see that day. I don't think we live in that world right now.

Elon:

I understand the idea. I understand that even for black people, sometimes you just don't want the struggle anymore. You don't want to discuss struggle, you don't want to discuss oppression, you don't want to discuss all the dumb shit that has happened for years and years. You don't want the feeling of burden when you turn on the television in February. God forbid you go near the History Channel, and you find out about all the shit that happened to all of your people! You don't want it. So, the idea of this time when it's all over is very intoxicating. It's easy.

In a weird way, I would love to argue for it because I wouldn't have to discuss the dumb shit. But it's also putting your head in the sand, and it's also not understanding the idea of repercussions and ripples of events happening in our country. And that's my issue with it.

I don't blame white people for Post-racial America . . . I believe that the idea probably wasn't negative. It was probably this idealized concept, and it probably came from a sense of privilege . . . It never happened. And two years later, after Post-racial America was ushered in, we are more racially tense now than we've been probably in the past twenty years. So, you know, post-racial can suck it.

That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say things that sound like deep and intelligent, and at the end of it I'm just going to go, “And they can suck it.”

I'm going to leave it to Derrick Ashong to close out this assessment of Post-racial America. He agrees with others that it isn't real, but he also sets forth a direction that resonated with me.

America is not now post-racial, and America will likely not be post-racial anytime soon, and America will have a significant problem so long as she is interested in being post-racial as opposed to getting to the point where race is no longer a problem.

People will always find ways to determine who is in and a part of us, and who's an outsider. And part of that is because . . . I define me to some degree in the context of you. I'm not just me existing in the world. I am, in part, me because I'm not you. We are part we because we're not y'all.

So folks will always find ways to create differences. The question is how much do those differences matter?

There was a time in this country when it was a big deal if you were a Catholic. That was a problem. There was a time in this country when it was a big deal if you were a Jew. Problem. Right now in this country, it's a big deal if you're a Muslim. Problem. But, you know, you go down the street, you go in to eat in a little place and you're a Catholic, a Jew, who cares? Everybody's marrying each other, making little brown babies that don't know whether to go to church on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so they just be at the club.

So basically, it's one of these things where what was a problem ceases to [be] as much of an issue. That is what is also happening with race, and it will continue to happen with race. Now you see a lot of beef right now because people who are used to, and whose worldview has been created in the crucible of how things once were in this country, they hearken to the good old days, which were not necessarily that great, even for them, frankly. But they hearken to those days, they yearn for those days of yore.

They forget that, yes, fifty years before the 1950s they were killing Irish people in New York. Their memory is limited. They forget that, yeah, you might persecute somebody for being Muslim here, but the Puritans who came out here back in the 1600s showed up to escape religious persecution.

So I know that societies and people tend to have a short historical memory, but that history happens anyway. We are moving and we will continue to move to a point where race will not be the primary issue that binds or divides us. We'll find something else, and we'll combat that, too.

So if the future is a United States in which race is no longer the primary issue that binds or divides us, then (a) why have you read this far in a book called
How to Be Black
, and (b) what's the future of blackness in America?