Glenn Loury posted on TPM this week an amazing response to the challenge leveled in Obama's "Black, But More Than Black" speech. All I can say is—Wow.
Coming from someone like Glenn, who is a friend (I kept my list of wedding invitees brutally short. He and his lovely, accomplished wife were on it), this is utterly unexpected and a welcome relief! He completely disagrees with me on the import of the speech, but he does so in such a worthy, worldview-tilting way, I'm still rereading it, trying to make sense of a rebellion so cogently, unapologetically worded. Now, it's on! This, as opposed to the kneejerk "how dare white people tell us what to do?" reflexive response of the stick-it-the-man crowd, we can work with.
In short, Loury demands to know where Obama, who inherited but played no part in earning freedom, gets off telling him he's a neurotic, tragic figure for still being angry. More, he argues that elder-generation black anger is not a pathetic symptom of PTSD, but a legitimate reflection of how far blacks' limited freedom falls short of true equality. Just as young women refuse to accept that we old school feminists are right that they don't yet know how un-liberated they still are—that they're living in a post-feminist fool's paradise that will dissolve before their eyes when the boss suddenly demands sex in exchange for a promotion that will otherwise go to his mistress—older, Talented Tenth blacks furiously reject the notion that past racism has made them incapable of noticing that Jim Crow is dead and that being black is just a state of mind.
Loury argues that black anger, as funneled through the black prophetic tradition that runs from (at least) Frederick Douglass through MLK and onto Wright, is all that stands between America and kinder, gentler apartheid (I exaggerate, but see his post to get my drift). Its counterintuitiveness was bracing for those, like me, who want us to pragmatically stifle our anger in exchange for something like separate but truly equal (again with the oversimplifying exaggeration).
Finally, a real debate with unexpected twists and turns that can't be dismissed as mere defiance! I'm all tingly! Sometimes, not often when a dance floor remains uninvolved, it's a hoot to be black. Whatever else you think of Obama, he is engendering the kind of dialogue and debate which alone can move America forward on race. That an intracommunal fracas is raging among blacks is the surest sign of that; we have to gain ground in-house before we can gain ground with outsiders. Offerings like this will do exactly that.
You simply have to read the post in its entirety, but here's a slice of the frontal assault Loury flings right back in "his son's" face:
[Read more]
Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign and the CEO of worldwide PR company Burson-Marsteller, has stepped down from his post with the Clinton campaign following the news that he 
