The recent suicide death of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover raises troubling questions about the incidence of bullying in our schools and other places where children interact. Earlier this month Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old African-American boy from Springfield, MA, took his own life, in response to the bullying he endured everyday at school. According to reports, Walker-Hoover was repeatedly taunted for “being gay.” That Walker-Hoover, who was not queer identified, was the target of homophobic vitriol speaks volumes about the challenges faced in society that has yet to fully interrogate how we raise and socialize our boys.

Thanks to best-selling books Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence (the inspiration for the film Mean Girls) and the emergence of YouTube, parents and schools are hypersensitive to the incidence of bullying in the lives children and the sophisticated ways that children deploy technology in such activities. But bullying, now as always, is symptomatic of our inability as a society to deal adequately with difference-sexual, racial, religious, ethnic, gendered, etc.-in meaningful ways.

While children usually understand about the consequences of bullying their peers-the ways they will be punished, for example-there’s still a continued skittishness within schools to actually deal with the reality of difference. This is particularly the case with discussions of sexual orientation, where some feel that focusing on sexual preference encourages behavior that far too many still view as “deviant” behavior. That the term “gay” has become an umbrella term for all things “uncool” in the lives of American children and teenagers, speaks to how dismissive we are of homophobia in our society.

Bullying of course takes many forms, but anyone who has spent any amount of time in the company of boys is well aware of how terms like “punk,” “faggot,” “bitch-ass” and “pussy” are part of the normative discourse of American boyhood. Even those boys, who are not necessarily invested in bullying, find themselves employing such terms as a form of protection, lest they also be targeted (as was the case when I was a boy). Unfortunately such behavior has long been relegated to the status of “boys being boys,” even as it articulates a troubling misogyny among other things. When such bullying escalates to the level of violence, as a society we are happy to enact punitive responses to the offenders without ever interrogating the root cause of the behavior.

Often lost in these responses is that this particular form of bullying is evidence of a general crisis of masculinity in our society, where boys and men, are all too often uncomfortable in the skins that they inhabit. While there is evidence that the behavior of some childhood bullies portends adult behavior tethered to more complex emotional and mental issues, there also little denying that many boys engage in bullying behavior against other boys, because they have been socialized to believe that’s what “real” boys and “real” men do. Bullying, particularly that which targets other male peers as “less than masculine,” helps masks anxieties about what real boyhood/manhood is supposed to be. Indeed such anxiety and apprehension about masculinity was so palpable in the life of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover that he chose to take his life rather than deal with the daily reminders that somehow he didn’t play to type.

While Walker-Hoover’s tragic death brings necessary attention to the consequences of bullying in our society, the bullying will continue unless we allow our boys and men to be comfortable with who they are, rather than performing some idea of what real maleness is supposed to be.

Click here to read Neal’s blog, NewBlackMan.

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One of the more interesting aspects of the Obama presidency thus far, has been the focus placed on some of the more mundane aspects of Black life in America. Simple gestures by the President and the First Lady, such as a fist pound and the bearing of bare arms have become obsessions for journalists and pundits. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than with the reaction to President Obama’s oft-cited complaint about young black men and their saggy pants and Michele Obama’s recent reflection about childhood friends who accused her of “talking white.” What passes as simple curiosity about a very popular elected official, I suspect has more sinister aims, when considered within the context of popular pronouncements like “no more excuses” in the aftermath of President Obama’s election. Thus casual commentary from the President and the First Lady serve as a bully pulpit for those desiring to police the lives and culture of Black Americans.

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For anyone familiar with the regular editorial content of the New York Post, the cartoon correlating  the recent killing of a chimpanzee with President Barack Obama and his stimulus package is not a surprise.

Despite the paper’s assertion that the cartoon was a parody of Washington insider politics and had little to do with President Obama’s identity as an African-American, there’s simply too much historical evidence in popular culture and media that establishes that primates have long been stand-in imagery for how some whites might view African-Americans, specifically Black men.  Just last year, controversy erupted over the cover of American Vogue, which featured a picture of Lebron James and supermodel Gisele Bundchen that seemed to allude to the film “King Kong”. For the New York Post to deny the legitimacy of such interpretations is at best disingenuous and at worst arrogant.   In this regard, the running of the cartoon and editorial defense of it, likely says more about the integrity—or lack of—of the New York Post than anything else.

Nevertheless this cartoon highlights the regular attempt to undermine the validity Obama’s presidency  within the realm of popular media and culture.  The New York Post is of course owned by Rupert Murdoch’s global conglomerate News Corporation, so it is important not to see the “chimpanzee cartoon” as separate and distinct from Fox News contributor’s Juan Williams’ delusional rants about Michele Obama’s presumed black radical political views.  Neither should the neo-conservative views of the Wall Street Journal, another News Corporation company, be dismissed as unrelated, despite the fact that the commentary on Fox News or the New York Post is decidedly more vulgar in its presentation.  The interconnectedness of these media entities underscores how many communities must become more sophisticated in response to racist, sexist or homophobic expression in the media.

In many ways the chimpanzee cartoon becomes the first major test of how racist expression can be combated in a so-called “post-race” society.  And let me be clear, the very idea of “post-race” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to the recent election of Barack Obama, who ran successfully for the presidency by being the “most perfect Negro ever.”  Until the country is willing to elect a person of color or women with, say the profile and credentials of number 43 (former alcoholic, failed business person, etc.) or the debilitating physical limitations of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I can’t buy that we live in a post-race or post-gender society, let alone in consideration of events like the New Year’s day  shooting death of Oscar Grant III.  That said, the reality is that a fair amount of Americans do believe that we live in a post-race society and our response to racist expression must take in account an increasingly held view that we should “get over it.”  As such, I am not advocating that we shouldn’t take to the airwaves to denounce the racists depictions in the New York Post—and some of our most prominent spokesperson acted as we have come to expect them to in that regard—but that our responses should be multi-layered and nuanced.  As legal scholar Derrick Bell suggest in his classic text Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1993), so-called oppressed peoples must balance obvious responses to racism with “cunning and guile.”

So while it’s important to put the editorial board at the New York Post on blast, it is also important to contact your local cable provider and threaten to cancel your subscription because you find some of the content of the News Corporation package (which includes Fox Sports Net, the FX Channel, and National Geographic) unbalanced or offensive.  The same could be said for those who in the past have supported News Corporation film productions courtesy of studios like Fox Searchlight and 20th Century Fox or Fox Broadcasting’s most recognizable brand, American Idol.  The point that I’m making here is that we cannot continue to rely on political responses that once served us well, but are out of sync with the world that has changed dramatically, the proof of which is that there is a actually Black male commander-in-chief, who could  be compared to a chimp.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books, including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.

Black support for Proposition 8 highlights one of the many fault-lines in the alliance that swept Barack Obama into the White House. The rhetoric is being amped up as some are essentially blaming black voters-often thought as critical to a liberal or progressive voting bloc-for  the revoking of same-sex marriage privileges.  The rift between traditional black voters and white progressives comes at a critical juncture, as President-Elect Obama seeks the political footing for his agenda. Without a viable and visible progressive political bloc, Obama will have little choice but to govern from the political center.

Though black voters have historically been some of the most consistent members of a liberal voting bloc, they tend to be more conservative on social issues such as same-sex marriage.  This was something that strategist Karl Rove understood as the Bush campaign used the shiny-ball that was same-sex marriage in the 2004 presidential to garner just enough support among black voters in a state like Ohio to turn the tide in favor of the incumbent. It was a lesson that those who sought to defeat Proposition 8 should have studied.
It is clear though that organizers did little outreach into black communities assuming that with a black presidential candidate that was supportive of same-sex marriage, (though more tepidly supportive of Proposition 8 during the campaign cycle), that black voters would fall in line.  But black views on same sex-marriage are more complicated; simply reading black voters as inherently homophobic misses the complexity of an issue that, in black communities, is often tied to the absence of black men as husbands and fathers.  Understood in that context, same-sex marriage goes against the belief of many within black communities that black survival is hopelessly tied to traditional marriage patterns.  That said, the Black Clergy needs to be accountable for hateful rhetoric directed towards gays, lesbians and transgendered citizens (including a good many in their congregations) and for willful fear-mongering.

Ultimately, black voters are simply challenged by the realities of their everyday concerns and support of issues like same-sex marriage seem more like a diversion.  This is a point that writer and activist Jasmyne A. Cannick recently made in the Los Angeles Times where she suggests that, “The first problem with Proposition 8 was the issue of marriage itself. The white gay community never successfully communicated to blacks why it should matter to us above everything else,” adding that, “the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both black gays and black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?”  Cannick offers a compelling argument here, but the very possibilities that Obama’s election created need to force those of us on both sides of this debate to think more creatively and yes, more progressively, about the challenges that we face.

For black communities we need to get past our romantic ties to the traditional nuclear family and the thought that we can only raise productive children if both a man and women are present in a household.  True, part of our investment in that familial model is the product of the stigma that had been historically attached to our cultural practices and indeed Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous critique of the black family suggested that we were doomed to stand outside of the American mainstream until we assumed a more traditional (less matriarchal) family structure.  But too often black communities turn a blind-eye to the violence and upheaval some of our most damaged men bring to our households, simply because there is a man in the house.  More to the point, Obama himself is evidence of models that don’t privilege the presence of father-figure per se, but rather the presence of many adults engaged in the lives of our children. Quite frankly, black children raised in a gay or lesbian household with engaged adult figures are likely better off than those raised in single-parent households or in heterosexual households where neither parent is up to the challenge of parenting.  The point here is that we need to be more sophisticated about how family structures function.

On the other side of the spectrum, those white progressives who sought to defeat Proposition 8 would do well to be a little more self-critical of the privilege that undergirds some of their politics.  Debates about same-sex marriage, however important they are, are debates that only a privileged few can really be engaged in.  The struggle for them is to better align these debates with the material realities of the working poor and the working class, communities for which the time to protest anything is at a premium.  University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen has made such a point wondering aloud, for example, how Queer activists might engage the lives of women of color, who though heterosexual, have made sexual choices that “are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support?” It is incumbent upon white progressives to get better at finding common ground with black communities, beyond the dated liberal agenda that brought us together in the first place.

Barack Obama’s election, to cite James Brown, was a signal that it is a new day.  It’s about time that our political organizing begins to reflect that reality.

There will no doubt be a few common threads of analysis that will emerge in the aftermath Senator Barack Obama’s defeat of John McCain in the 2008 Presidential contest. Many will debate the merits of the dominance of the Democrats in the Executive and Legislative wings of government. Others will remark on the near flawless execution of the Obama campaign. Much of the commentary though will center on how Obama’s election will impact the historical role of race in our national discourse.

Many pundits were quick to say that Obama’s victory will not erode centuries of anti-black racism in this country. But conventional wisdom suggests that traditional analyses of anti-black racism as a top-down phenomenon have to be rethought when an African-American sits as the so-called leader of the free world.

Obama’s election then raises critical questions about the role and continued relevance of advocacy organizations such as the NAACP, The National Urban League, and the Congressional Black Caucus.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909, their explicit mission was to agitate on behalf of “American Negroes,” particularly within the realms of public policy. In the early 20th century, public policy for Blacks was primary focused on eroding legal segregation in public spaces and challenging random violence often directed at African-Americans.

Founded a year later, The National Urban League was focused on economic development and jobs, issues that were critical to a generation of African-Americans who were migrating in large numbers from the rural south into large urban centers such as Chicago and New York City.

Despite minor ideological differences between the organizations and their leaders, both groups saw their charge as providing advocacy for African-Americans. The Brown vs. The Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) case, which provided the legal logic for the desegregation of American Public Schools, is perhaps the most visible example of the effectiveness of the nearly century of advocacy by the two organizations.

It is, perhaps, telling that both groups were somewhat marginal to the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement as more regional and direct action groups-like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party-were at the forefront.

Both organizations have gone through very public reexaminations of their roles in recent years as the terrain in which race is lived for many blacks has shifted in the post-Civil Rights Era. The NACCP, for example, in the midst of the eight years of the Bush administration’s gutting of the Civil Rights apparatus in the Justice Department, felt compelled to have a symbolic funeral for the word “nigger.”

Unlike the activist organizations, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was the product of the first critical mass of black representatives elected to the House of Representatives. The CBC was formally established in 1971 with 13 founding members (all Democrats) including the late Shirley Chisholm and current representatives John Conyers and Charles Rangel.

Currently with 43 members, the CBC’s primary role has been as a political broker between their largely black constituents and whatever political party was in control of the legislative and executive branches. The CBC’s influence was perhaps most pronounced during the first two years of Bill Clinton’s administration as the ranks of the group swelled in the aftermath of Jesse Jackson’s efforts to register voters in 1988.

With significant Republican majorities in the House and Senate during the recent Bush administration, the CBC was often marginalized; President Bush refused to meet with the group for much of his presidency. The CBC’s split over the candidacy of Barack Obama (himself a member of the Caucus) during the primary season spoke volumes about the limits of a politics of brokerage.

CBC members tried to gauge which candidate they would have the most bargaining power with. Georgia Representative and CBC Member John Lewis retreated from his support of Senator Hillary Clinton, after his constituency showed an overwhelming preference for Obama. Lewis’s shift highlights the extent to which the brokerage politics of the CBC and so many of the black political leadership held over from the Civil Rights Era is often out of sync with the needs and desires of the black electorate.

Ironically, it is that same electorate, having grown significantly during Obama’s campaign, which may hold the key to groups like the CBC, NAACP and the Urban League maintaining their relevancy.

Ever the pragmatist and as someone whose campaign was intent on bringing together the traditional democratic base with independents and centrist Republicans, there’s little doubt that Obama will govern from the center of the political spectrum. Despite the rhetoric of the campaign, there’s little evidence that Obama is a true political progressive,.

Yet the coalition of new voters, African-Americans, Latina (o), Chicana (o) and young voters that made Obama’s candidacy possible represents one of the most progressive coalitions that we’ve seen since the Vietnam War Era-a coalition that is emboldened by working class and middle income voters who are in dire need of a radical redress of their economic conditions.

Obama showed a particular disdain throughout his 21-month campaign with being thought of as a black candidate or as a broker for black issues. The President-Elect will likely show the same disdain for a black political establishment wholly wedded to the race politics of a quarter century ago.

If the NAACP, National Urban League and Congressional Black Caucus aim to remain relevant in the future, it is this new coalition of progressives that they will need to provide leadership for, taking advantage of the political will that Obama’s campaign has generated.

How do groups like the NAACP and Urban league play a leadership role in a broad progressive movement-in which race is only part of a broader platform centered on traditional issues of social justice (policing, incarceration rates, equitable wages), tax relief for middle income families, a repeal of No Child Left Behind and what Van Jones, in the name of the Green Industry, calls Eco-equity?

Can these organizations speak to these issues with the understanding that any redress directed at the black community has historically and invariably affected a larger segment of the nation?

In the case of the Congressional Black Caucus, can they move beyond a politics of brokerage to form the real progressive wing of the Democratic Party?

One step might be to revaluate membership in the CBC, which historically has been limited to black members. Obama’s own identity raises interesting questions about the fluidity of racial identity, but, more specifically, wouldn’t those black constituents of white representatives whose districts are primarily black or Latina (o), be better served by caucusing with the Congressional Black Caucus?

After years of positioning themselves to make back-room deals that are often at odds with their constituencies, groups like the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Congressional Black Causes have a real responsibility to trouble the political waters; in fact this historic moment demands that they corral the powerful wave that swept the first African-American into the Oval Office for the benefit of the very coalition that made it possible-if not their own continuing relevance.

The same could not be said for my father, who at the age of 18 had little expectation that he could participate in the electoral process, let alone pull a lever for someone who even remotely represented his interest, as a young, illiterate black man growing up in Georgia in the early 1950s.

Eventually my father left the South in 1959 for the big city in an attempt to make a life for himself As the world changed around him-the 1963 March on Washington, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the birth of his only child and the assassination of Rev. King and Robert Kennedy-my father simply put his head down and did what his father had taught him; he kept quiet, didn’t make any trouble, put in a hard day’s work and took care of his family.

In that regard, my father was like so many of the men of his generation, who simply believed that if they put in the time, the rewards of their hard work and their faith in the system would eventually be realized. At the very least my father thought he was investing in a future that his son could benefit from.

It was perhaps that sense of investment in the future that led my father to register to vote for the first time in 1976, though it was more likely the pressure exerted by his labor union-Local 1199-to get more involved as so many municipal unions were under siege in the 1970s.

New York City in the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Mayor Abraham Beame, was on the brink of an unprecedented financial collapse. 1976 was the year that the New York Daily News famously published the headline “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” in response to then President Ford’s denial of the city’s request for federal relief. In addition, the Democrats nominated a peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, as their Presidential nominee-whom my father identified with as a fellow Georgian.

It was likely that all of these things conspired to make my father do what he had never done before in his life: He voted. He was 41 years old. It was the only time he voted in his life. In retrospect, I’d like to think it was one of the few lasting gifts he could give to his son. Because of his simply act, 1976 was the year that I was awakened to the political process.

I thought about my father’s choices as I walked into my local precinct to vote a few days ago. The spirit of my father, who died on February of this year, has been with me throughout Barack Obama’s 20-month run for the presidency. My father died only a week or two after Senator Obama’s successes on Super Tuesday, so we never really had the chance to talk about Obama’s run.

I imagine that my father would have expressed many of the fears that those of his generation have long held with regards to Obama’s safety. I imagine that my father would have been impressed by Obama’s cool demeanor-much like his own-as enemies and detractors questioned his competence, his qualifications and his patriotism.

I imagine that my father, who suffered from MS and was disabled for the last decade of his life, would have managed to cast only the second vote in his life if fate hadn’t denied him that opportunity.

So in addition to all of the issues that matter to me this election season, I walked in the voting booth and cast a vote in the name of my father-as my father had once cast a vote in the name of his son. I hope to feel him smiling from heaven on the morning of November 5th.

(She’s also the mother of Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph). However, for many Americans in the 1970s, Riperton was more than just an incredible singer, but the public face of breast cancer.

Riperton understood that with celebrity came responsibility, so she publicly announced her trauma on national television, confiding in Tonight Show guest host Flip Wilson-and the rest of the country. Riperton would soon become the first African-American public spokesperson for the American Cancer Society, receiving the organization’s “Courage Award” at a White House ceremony with then-President Jimmy Carter. Nearly thirty years after her death, black women continue to be at the forefront of preventative outreach efforts.

In comparison to white women, black women are less likely to get breast cancer. However, black women are far more likely to die from it, in many cases because they are typically diagnosed at a much later stage than are white women. In addition, white women have longer survival rates once they contract the disease, even while black women are diagnosed at younger ages. To further complicate the situation, cancer tumors found in black women tend to be more aggressive than those found in white women.

Among the more obvious reasons for these discrepancies is that black women, particularly poor black women, often don’t have the same healthcare resources that their white peers do. The National Cancer Institute suggests that even when black women do have access to healthcare, they are less likely to receive state-of-the-art diagnostic treatments and procedures.

Also, the health issues of black men are often more prominently addressed than those of black women. Thus, concerns about breast cancer among black women are often overshadowed by legitimate concerns for the high incidence of hypertension and prostate disease among black men, even though such diseases also disproportionately affect black women as well.

In the spirit of Minnie Riperton’s work three decades ago, Susan G. Komen for the Cure (the foundation responsible for the ubiquitous pink ribbons during Breast Cancer Awareness Month) began the “Circle of Promise” campaign to mobilize awareness about breast cancer in the black community, dispel myths that prevent black women from seeking early treatment and empower black women to become strong advocates for themselves and their loved ones.  Susan G. Komen for the Cure estimates that in 2007, nearly 20,000 black women were diagnosed with breast cancer and more than 5,000 succumbed to the disease.

To help spread the word, the Circle of Promise campaign has employed the talents of a group of national ambassadors, including actress Gabrielle Union, artist Synthia Saint James, health expert Dr. Rovenia Brock and vocalist Lalah Hathaway (daughter of the late soul legend Donny Hathaway).

When asked about her involvement with Circle of Promise, Hathaway states, “I call it my grown-up job. It charges me to talk with women, particularly African-American women, about their health, because breast cancer is killing us at such an alarming rate. We’re always the last to be diagnosed and the first to die.”

That many cable news networks felt compelled to devote air time to speculation about the cost of Palin’s wardrobe and her family’s travel itinerary is the by-product 24-hour news programming.  This incessant need to fill every hour with content, no matter how trivial, contributes to the dumbing-down of an American electorate salivating for information. But there’s something more troubling at play here, an issue that has everything to do with the brave new world that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have ushered in.

Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin share very little ideologically or politically, but during the 2008 election cycle, they will be forever linked by the palpable sexism that has accompanied mainstream media coverage of their campaigns. Frenzy over the cost of Palin’s RNC sponsored wardrobe is not unlike the mocking of Clinton’s pantsuits. In a society largely concerned with the physical attractiveness of women, it’s not surprising that women politicians with national constituencies would also be subject to beauty contest standards, even by so-called respectable journalists. Indeed, the lack of mainstream commentary about the not-so-hushed descriptions of Palin as a “MILF” and Clinton’s lack of so-called MILF appeal speaks to how insulated many of us are to how these dynamics function in media coverage.

In contrast, little has been made of the finely tailored suits worn by the three men running for national office. But that’s to be expected in a culture less interested in what our male leaders wear-the concerns about the cost of John Edwards’s haircuts notwithstanding-and  more concerned with their performances of power, competency and authority.

Sadly, such standards are rarely applied to women politicians. However, if any of the current male candidates were novices to the national political stage, both the RNC and the DNC will have doled out significant cash to upgrade their wardrobes, and few people would think twice about what is essentially no different than the clothing allowances offered by many employers.

The current investigation of Palin’s use of state funds for family travel highlights another aspect of the mainstream media’s lack of sensitivity toward women politicians. Palin is one of first women to run for national office with young children (as is the case with Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente). In America, where the role of women as nurturers and caretakers prevails, there are going to be obvious occasions where such women will have to balance the demands of traditional parenting with their official responsibilities.

Indeed women politicians carry the added burden of being judged not just for their political effectiveness, but also for their fitness as mothers. Male politicians rarely face the same litmus test.

Gary Younge made this point The Nation months ago, when he wrote: “Speculation as to how Palin could possibly balance her responsibilities as a mother of five with the vice presidency or whether her daughter ‘strayed’ because her mother was too preoccupied with work is inappropriate and offensive. McCain has seven children-two of whom are older than Sarah Palin-and those questions are never asked about him.”

Like Geraldine Ferraro, who was the Democratic candidate for Vice President twenty-four years ago, Sarah Palin’s ascendance onto the national stage, coupled with Hillary Clinton’s success in the Democratic primaries, have forever changed the role of gender in national politics. For many progressives, there are legitimate reasons to question Sarah Palin’s fitness as Vice President; let’s not let sexism and misogyny undermine our legitimate ideological differences with her.

The newest boogey-man on the block is Franklin Raines. And Senator Obama’s purported relationship with the former chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association), has been at the cornerstone of attempts by the McCain campaign to depict Obama as dangerous for the American economy.

Raines elevation to “boogey-man” follows a pattern we’ve witnessed where Senator Obama’s opponents use figures like Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weather Underground radical William Ayers to question his preparedness, his judgment and his integrity.

Why not? It worked for Republican nominee George Bush’s anti-crime presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988, when a now-infamous television ad about a black felon named Willie Horton scared the living daylights out of white America.

But Raines is no Willie Horton. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former Rhodes Scholar when he became Vice-chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991. He stepped down from that position in 1996 to become Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. In 1999, Raines left the Clinton administration to become the chairman of Fannie Mae with the celebratory note of being the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Raines was forced out of Fannie Mae in late 2004 under suspicions of covering up various accounting irregularities that ultimately increased his annual compensation. Many analysts point to Raines as being at the root of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae-and the subsequent bailout by the Federal Treasury.

Given Raines’ professional experience and their Harvard Law connection, it was likely a no-brainer for Barack Obama to seek out his expertise on the current mortgage crisis. But the McCain camp has suggested something more sinister. They claim that Raines was one of Obama’s key economic advisors.

McCain blames the practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) for the economic meltdown and stretch connections like these to rally supporters. The McCain ad could have easily taken its cue from the conservative leaning National Legal and Policy Center. Upon the former chairman’s departure in 2004, the Center implored citizens to “Stop Franklin Raines’ Rape of Fannie Mae.”

To be fair, Raines does deserve critical scrutiny, given the revelations that he received below market loans from the troubled Countrywide Financial while heading Fannie Mae. At the time of his retirement, he was eligible for $30 million in Fannie Mae stock, while drawing a $1 million per year pension-putting him squarely in the same class as the many Wall Street execs who benefited from creating the current financial crisis.

But the aim of McCain’s ads is not to simply hold Raines accountable. Instead, the message is this: a lack of integrity and professionalism in one black man with a Harvard pedigree could very possibly extend to another. This line of reasoning just might work for those still wrapping their heads around the likelihood of an African American being the leader of the free world. But as evidenced by Raines own ascent, corporate America has long taken a more progressive view.

Raines is part of a generation of highly trained black overachievers, who in the past decade have taken the helm of major American corporations, including Richard Parsons (CEO of Time Warner from 2003-2008, who still serves as board chair), Ken Chenault (current CEO and board chair of American Express), Stanley O’Neal (CEO and board chair of Merrill Lynch until his retirement in 2007-with a compensation package worth more than $160 million), and Paula Sneed (Executive Vice President of Global Marketing Resources and Initiatives for Kraft Foods until her retirement in 2006).

Much like the careers of some of their political peers, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the success of all these figures has been a mixed bag. But their track records overall are a far cry from the sense of doom that the McCain camp links to a possible Obama presidency. With Raines, however, McCain’s handlers have found this political season’s Willie Horton. Only he now sports a Harvard degree and a business suit.

Watch a McCain Ad Here:

Watch the infamous Willie Horton Ad here:

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man.

And it is no different in this case. There’s little question that working-class and poor Americans are catching the brunt of what some pundits have called a recession. In this election season however, the working class and so-called working poor are often recalled only in relation to branding one presidential candidate an elitist and the other as out-of-touch with the economic mainstream.

Yet clearly the presidential candidates have been directing their economic rhetoric at the middle-class. Perhaps rightfully so, given widespread perceptions that the middle class sees its own financial stability as tied to the housing market and investment banking, particularly for those who hold 401K plans and various other IRA and pension plans.

But what exactly do we mean by the “middle class?” FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication notes that there’s no standard definition to “middle class,” observing that the vast majority of Americans view themselves as middle-class.  Even the presidential candidates seem unable to agree, as Senator McCain recently suggested (admittedly, in jest) that $5 million per year is the dividing line between being middle-class and rich.

In the absence of clear definitions that also account for social factors like geography, education and social class standing (a college professor making $40,000 a year has more social standing than an electrician that makes three times as much), most pundits use median income as a marker of middle-class status. According to 2005 census data, the median income for American families was a little more than $56,000. But when that data is adjusted for race, the median income for blacks is nearly $20,000 less than it is for whites.

When one looks at the comparisons between black and white incomes between $35,000 and $75,000, there is noticeable parity. However, for all of the egalitarian talk that those numbers might suggest, the reality is that middle-class blacks and whites who might live in the same neighborhoods, send their kids to the same private schools, and earn the same annual incomes are not equal.

What separates middle-class blacks and whites is the issue of wealth, determined by financial assets such as property ownership, investments, savings and a range of other holdings. According to Thomas M. Shapiro in his controversial book The Hidden Cost of Being African-American, the financial worth of a typical white family is $81,000 versus only $8,000 for a typical black family.

In terms of home ownership, blacks have longed been plagued by loan practices that force them to pay higher mortgage rates, thus ultimately paying more money for houses that are worth the same as their white peers. Such practices impact blacks not simply in terms of on-hand cash each month, but also in their ability to generate equity in their homes. Home equity can translate into financial flexibility when it comes to paying for their children’s college tuition, long-term health care and simply improving the value of their homes through home improvements.

Another reason for the discrepancy has to do with the role of parental assistance. Many middle-class whites are given a head start on wealth accumulation via their parents (i.e. covering the cost of college and graduate or professional schooling, providing down-payment assistance for first homes, child care for their grand-children, etc). Such support is often the difference between living with debt and having the ability to save money.

Increasingly, young blacks also benefit from the assistance of their parents, but as Shapiro notes, they provide financial support for family members, particularly aging parents, more often than their white peers. Shapiro argues that blacks are “more susceptible to falling from middle class grace, less capable of cushioning hard times, and less able to retool careers and change directions.” This is particularly so for those who are first generation middle-class.

Unfortunately, the very group who accepted that higher education was the vehicle to middle-class success now finds that there is no golden parachute—like the one the government has provided for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, etc. Their just-in-case war chest to protect them from being allowed in the game too late and with too little backup resources is non-existent.

Wealth remains just as difficult to attain for contemporary black Americans as it might have been for generations before, despite how many digits on our paychecks. And the lack of it is precisely why the current U.S. financial crisis poses an even greater threat to the black middle-class.

As recently as a month ago, NBC commentator and former NFL player Tiki Barber referred to his on-air colleague Jenna Wolfe as a “full medal cunt,” during NBC’s Olympic broadcasts. The comment generated little, if any, press scrutiny. Now, the same press wants us to believe that Obama’s use of an odd colloquialism is somehow tantamount to issues like domestic violence, inequitable wages, the rape and murder of female military personnel by their male peers and the media’s own questionable coverage of Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin.

Of course, that it was John McCain who felt compelled to raise the issue of sexism in the Obama campaign is absurd in and of itself. My guess is that Senator McCain has likely never heard of the Ms. Foundation or the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, let alone the hundreds of less prominent, though no less effective, organizations and activists that combat sexism, misogyny and violence against women and girls on-the-ground, everyday.

This is the same John McCain who uttered nary a mumbling word when a supporter rhetorically asked, in reference to Senator Hillary Clinton, “How do we beat the bitch”? Now we are to accept that issues of gender are high on his list of domestic concerns? In this particular instance, McCain is in company with many other men: he refuses to challenge other men on legitimate examples of sexism and misogyny.

In the process, he, like they, becomes complicit in the very sexism and misogyny that they claim to be concerned about.

The McCain campaign, here, smacks of the very cynicism that fueled the choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the absence of sustained conversations about patriarchy and the legitimate limits placed of women in American society, any woman will do. The truth is, there are other women in the Republican Party—Senators Olympia Snowe and Elizabeth Dole for example—that were more qualified.

It is the same cynicism that has eroded the intent of affirmative action in this country—in the absence of real conversation about how to increase the pool of qualified candidates, any black person will do.

Granted, McCain’s sudden concern for gender issues is little more than campaign season politicking. His goal here is to divert attention from other pressing issues. Likewise, it’s convenient for mainstream media to call Senator Barack Obama a sexist, hoping to deflect their complicity in sexist coverage this campaign season.

For both, Obama makes an easy target. Black men have historically been held up as the default example for the most heinous examples of sexism, misogyny, and sexual violence in this country. The Scottsboro case, the circumstances surrounding Nushawn Williams or Don Imus’s defense of his on-air comments about the Rutgers Women’s basketball team are just a few examples of such thinking.

However effective politically McCain’s cynical turn, his sudden championing of women’s issues does real injustice, if not outright damage, to women. Their concerns deserve much more attention than campaign utterings that do nothing to improve conditions in the lives of actual women. And a pig is still a pig, whether it has on lipstick—or mud.

In a nation in which nearly 50 million people lack health insurance of any kind, most seniors over the age of 65 are nominally covered by Medicare. TheMedicare system has its faults, particularly with regards to affordable prescription drugs. And the system also offers little for long-term care, except under specific circumstances. 

As Americans increasingly live longer lives and with millions of seniors suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, long term care options, such as nursing homes, assisted-living environments and retirement communities, have become increasingly prevalent. The struggle for many seniors is trying to find ways to pay for long-term care.

Wealthy seniors are often able to leverage their homes and other forms of wealth, including pensions and other investments, to buy into retirement communities. These communities extend care as the health status of senior change. Many such communities can cost as much as $100,000 just to buy in. And monthly expenses for various care-giving services can rival and exceed that of monthly mortgage payments. Only a small fraction of Americans have this kind of financial flexibility.

By contrast, the poorest seniors in the country are often eligible for Medicaid. Medicaid allows them to receive long term home and institutional care. While pithy as compared to some high-end senior care facilities, it at least allows them some relative dignity.

But the real tragedy exists for those seniors who often have worked their whole lives, paying into the social security system and who also have some sort of pension set aside for them. They are the ones who arrive at their senior years only to discover that the combination of their pensions and their social security payments generate too much income to be considered for Medicaid—even though they can’t afford assisted living or nursing homes. These seniors literally have to spend themselves into impoverishment before they are eligible for long-term care. And then, it is often too late.

Senior care is a particularly troubling issue for the post-Civil Rights generation of African-Americans, who often earn the same salaries as their white counterparts, while lagging behind in terms of wealth.  Just as many post-Civil Rights Blacks are finally paying a down payment on the American Dream, they find themselves challenged to have to provide elder care—both physical and financial—that most are simply unprepared and unequipped to provide.  

As upper income whites expect to pass their wealth on to their children, many middle class Black Americans, as other Americans who share their financial predicament, find themselves passing their wealth back to own parents, just to help meet their parent’s healthcare cost.

A quick glance at Senator McCain’s website shows little information about long term health care for seniors, which is rather surprising given that the senator is a senior himself. Then again, it’s not surprising—given that the senator could finance his own high-end long-term care by selling one of his seven houses. 

And despite all of Senator Obama’s lofty language about healthcare in general, the senator’s “at-a-glance” position paper on senior issues contains only obligatory language about the need to stop insurance fraud among long-term caregivers. The document vaguely notes that as President, Obama will also “work to reform the financing of long term care to protect seniors and families from impoverishment or debt.”  

No doubt such reform will be a long way off for those senior and their adult children currently helping them to make ends meet. Meanwhile, what awaits them both—to use the senator’s own word—are “catastrophic” circumstances.

It was against this backdrop that Michelle Obama, wife of the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, took center stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Co. Michelle Obama was not the first black woman to give a keynote address at the national convention of a major political party. That honor goes to the late Texas Congresswomen Barbara Jordan.

Jordan delivered a keynote address at the 1976 Democratic convention that nominated Jimmy Carter for President and again in 1992, when Bill Clinton was nominated. Jordan admitted in her speech, that when the Democratic Party held its first convention in 1832 “it would have been most unusual for any national political party to ask a Barbara Jordan to deliver a keynote address.” That was to the extent that Jordan spoke at all to her identity and experiences as a black woman.

Michelle Obama was only 12-years old when Jordan delivered her first keynote. What she and a nation of African-Americans and others heard was a woman who eloquently represented the passions and ambitions of women and African-Americans. And indeed, like Senator Clinton’s historic candidacy, Barbara Jordan’s own “first” has long been held up as a transcendent moment for women, particularly black women, in politics.

We are in a historical moment in which black women are regularly celebrated and lauded for a number of achievements in politics. Notably, there is the career of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Donna Brazile, who directed Vice-President Gore’s Presidential campaign in 2000 and continues a leadership role within the Democratic Party; the case of Susan E. Rice, who was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton Administration and is currently a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Obama campaign; and the stellar example of the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who was the first black women elected to congress from Ohio.

While many of these women serve as wonderful inspirations to a nation of many, rarely do their political perches allow for a greater understanding of the lives lived by black women.

In this regard, Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was truly groundbreaking. Though Ms. Obama’s charge was to provide some inkling into her life with the presumptive nominee—to humanize the man named Barack to the still uninitiated. Her challenge was to do so in a way that assured the uncommitted that the Obamas share their values.

By the time she descended the center stage, she’d done much more. The brilliance of her speech was that Ms. Obama was able to speak to her life as a black daughter, as a black sister, as a black mother and as a black wife in a way that was unprecedented during a prime time address at a major political convention.

More than 100 years ago W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in his legendary text The Souls of Black Folk that African-Americans lived behind a veil, rendering much of their everyday lives invisible to most white Americans. In so many ways, the difficulties that Barack Obama has faced in being accepted by some whites suggest that such a veil still exists. For a few moments though on Monday night, Michelle Obama was able to lift that veil and make visible the lives of the black women who inspired her and the black girls that she inspires.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man.

Senator Clinton and her supporters have strongly linked aspects of her campaign to feminist sensibilities. One wonders how those women, whose feminism is pitched to critical issues like poverty, childcare, domestic and sexual violence, inadequate healthcare and inequitable wages, will experience catharsis through a merely symbolic vote?

Senator’s Clinton’s campaign brought to the surface how cavalierly commentators and pundits employed sexist and even misogynist language to describe the candidate. In one instance, CNN host Glenn Beck called Clinton a “stereotypical bitch.” Even on MSNBC, the so-called “liberal alternative” to Fox News, host Tucker Carlson could comment “There’s just something about [Hillary Clinton] that feels castrating, overbearing, and scary.”

Such language speaks volumes about the extent to which sexism and misogyny permeates media culture. This same media and its sexist culture helped frame discussions about Clinton’s candidacy.

When CBS anchor Katie Couric publicly addressed the sexism of media pundits, for example, MSNBC’s Keith Olberman prefaced his response by calling Couric the “worst person in the world.” In this environment, The Clinton campaign rightly highlighted how the senator’s gender was used to undermine the viability of her campaign.

But like the racist-language gaffes of radio host Don Imus and comedian Michael Richards, sexist language and sentiment is just that. To be sure, policing such language is not the same as engaging a feminist politics that aims to dramatically alter the quality of life for women in this country. On this count, healthcare reform notwithstanding, the Clinton campaign was lacking and understandably so.

Just as the Obama camp has been hamstrung either by force or choice, to offer concrete policy initiatives that address the specific realities of anti-black racism in this country, the Clinton campaign was never in a position to articulate a true feminist vision for this county—if in fact the Senator from New York is truly invested in such a vision.

Clinton’s campaign found middle ground by highlighting the symbolic value of her candidacy to feminist movement veterans, like Gloria Steinem, and to a professional class of women. But these symbolic connections often came at the expense of the concerns of a feminist working class. Also sacrificed were concerns of feminists of color. Clinton supporters’ silence in the face of racist and sexist commentary directed towards Michele Obama is perhaps the most pronounced example of the latter case.

So feminists of all colors and genders (I might add) are left with the symbolism of a roll-call vote at the Democratic Convention. Despite the so-called catharsis of the moment, the roll-call vote further diminishes the legitimacy of the Feminist and Women’s movements.

The issues that affect the lives of women (and the men and children in their lives) deserve more than lip service. Senator Obama must see past this so-called olive branch to Clinton’s supporters. And it is incumbent upon the presumed Democratic nominee to push forward a party platform that makes clear his commitments to the lives of women in this country—even if he is unwilling to call it the feminism that it is.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man.

Though “Black in America” was short on solutions to all that ails us, it was Fryer who offered up one of the most provocative responses. He suggested that students should be paid for good grades to counter the so-called achievement gap between whites and blacks in schooling.

As the Chief Equity Officer in New York City’s Department of Education, Fryer is in a unique position to make this claim. He has implemented such a plan in several New York City public schools at the behest of Schools Chancellor Joel L. Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under his program, forth and seventh graders will be paid up to $250.00 and $500.00, respectively, for earning high grades on standardized test.

Why pay our kids to do what is nominally expected of them? Criticism of the program have ranged from “there is no price tag for the love of learning” to “it’s common sense for students to earn good grades in order to better their opportunities in life.”

But common sense doesn’t take into account the realities of life in the era of “No Child Left Behind.”

“No Child Left Behind” legislation, one of the cornerstone’s of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential platform, links schools’ performance with funding. The most critical component of “No Child Left Behind” is a series of standardized tests that are used to assess teacher productivity and student achievement. Schools that meet required assessment levels can expect continued funding; schools that don’t find themselves scuffling for resources.

While most Americans regardless of race, class and ethnicity are concerned with accountability in our schools, there are real questions as to whether “No Child Left Behind” is actually doing more harm to our children, particularly black children.

Professor Theoni Soublis Smyth, for example, addresses some of these concerns in her recent article “Who is No Child Left Behind Leaving Behind?” “High stakes testing,” she argues, “is forcing instruction to change from exploratory, lifelong learning to teaching to the test through drill and kill.”

“Tests have turned into the objective of classroom instruction rather than the measure of teaching and learning,” she says. In short, aspects of intuitive learning and critical thinking have been largely replaced by testing drills focused on students achieving the highest grades possible on required standardized exams.

Of course these tests have real implications with regards to the quality of public schools and the ability of our children to be promoted. And what truly can’t be ignored is that we are now witnessing the new reality of public schooling in this country. That reality includes three important shifts.

First, legislators and elected officials are highly motivated to show constituents that they are holding the system accountable. Second, “No Child Left Behind,” is a bottom-line rationale for spending less on public schooling. And finally, in this new era testing has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
Rather than closing the achievement gap, “No Child Less Behind, widens it.

When the smoke clears, it all boils down to test preparation and incentives. More affluent parents have the advantage of being able to pay for tutorial services and other test preparation efforts. Likewise, when their children lack self-motivation, they can provide those incentives in the form of a new Ipod, Nintendo DS, X-Box, or cash. And no one ever begrudges the right for those parents to reward their children for good grades.

However we feel about “pay for grade,” Fryer’s logic cuts to the chase of this new era of American public school education. Simply put, kids across the board—economically disadvantage students in poor schools too—who have real incentives to score better on standardized test will produce better test results.

I, for one, commend Fryer for this attempt to level the playing field. His approach may be troubling. But it’s certainly an innovative approach to address an achievement gap between black and white kids, made even more dramatic because of “No Child Left Behind.”

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man.